Legends

1997: MARTIN ODUM IS MESMERIZED TO TEARS

THE JETLINER ELBOWED THROUGH THE TOWERING CLOUDS AND emerged into an airspace as cheerless as sky gets without sun. Dark pitted fields ribbed with irrigation gutters unfurled under the belly of the plane. From his window seat, Martin Odum watched Prague tilt up in its oval frame as if it were perched on the high end of a teeterboard. In his mind’s eye he imagined the buildings yielding to gravity and sliding downslope into the Vltava, the broad mud-colored river meandering through the center of the city that looked, to Martin’s jaundiced eye, like a beautiful woman who had been tempted by a face lift too many. The plane’s wing dipped and Prague leveled out and the hills rimming the bowl of the city swam into view on the horizon, with the prefabricated Communist-era high rise apartment boxes spilling over the crests into the bleak countryside. A moment later the tarmac rushed up to graze the wheels of the plane. “Welcome to Prague,” announced a recorded voice over the public-address system. “We hope your flight has been enjoyable. The captain and his crew thank you for flying Czech Airlines.”

“You’re definitely welcome,” Martin heard himself respond. The buxom English woman in the next seat must have heard him too, because she favored him with a look reserved for passengers having conversations with recorded announcements. Martin felt obliged to decipher his remark. “Any airline that gets me where I’m going in one piece has my unstinting gratitude,” he informed her.

“If you are frightened of flying,” she retorted, “you should entertain the idea of traveling by train.”

“Frightened of trains, too,” Martin said gloomily. He thought of the Italian girl Paura that Lincoln Dittmann had come across in Foz do Iguaçú, the one who was afraid of her shadow. He wondered what had become of her. To this day he wasn’t one-hundred percent sure the woman Lincoln had accosted on the Janicular and the call girl in Brazil were one and the same person. There had been a physical resemblance, so Lincoln had claimed, but the two women had been a world apart in mood and manner. “Frightened of arriving at places I haven’t been to before,” Martin told his neighbor now. “Frightened of motion and movement, frightened of the going and the getting there.”

The English woman was eager to put an end to the exchange and formulated a cutting remark that would accomplish it. But she decided she might be dealing with an authentic maniac after all and kept her mouth shut.

Making his way through the crowded terminal following the overhead signs with images of busses on them, a thin Beedie glued to his lower lip, Martin found his path blocked by a slight young man with an ironic grimace pasted on his fleshy lips. He was dressed in khaki jodhpurs that buttoned at the ankles and a green Tyrolean jacket with tarnished brass buttons. For an instant Martin thought he had been spotted by the local constabulary, but the young man quickly made it clear he was freelancing. “Mister, no difference if you are come to Praha for business or pleasure, in both conditions you will be requiring a fixer whose honorarium will be conspicuously less than what you would find yourself expending on hotels and transportation and meals if you do not accept to employ my services.” The young man, anxious to please, doffed his deerstalker and, pinching one of the two visors between a thumb and two fingers, held it over his solar plexus. “Radek at your beck and call for an insignificant thirty crowns an hour, which translates into one lousy U.S. dollar.”

Martin was tempted. “What made you pick me?” he wanted to know.

“You look reasonably U.S. and I need to varnish my English for the year-end examinations that must be passed with floating colors to arrive into medical school.”

“Flying colors, not floating colors.”

The young man beamed. “Flying colors it will be from this second in time until Alzheimer’s sets in.”

Martin knew himself to be a poor judge of age, but Radek looked a little old to be thinking of going to medical school, and he said so.

“I am a late blossomer,” the young man said with a disarming grin.

Martin wasn’t so much interested in saving money as time. His instinct told him that he had to get into and out of Prague before Crystal Quest, whose operatives would not be far behind, informed the local security people of his presence; before the Chechens who murdered Taletbek Rabbani caught up with him. He produced a ten dollar bill from his shirt pocket. “Fair enough, Radek—here are ten hours in advance. I want to take a bus into the city. I want to rent a room in a cheap hotel in the Vyshrad quarter that has a fire staircase leading to an employees’ entrance. Then I want to make a phone call from the central post office, after which I would like to eat a copious vegetarian meal in a cheap restaurant—”

“I know definitely the cheap hotel. It is former secret police dormitory turned into a student bed and breakfast when communism demised. When you are checkered in, I will pilot you to a mom and pop’s Yugoslav eatery, not much grander than a crackle in the wall, all vegetarian except for the meat.”

Martin had to laugh. “Sounds like just the ticket.”

Radek tried the phrase on his tongue. “Just the ticket. I see the meaning. And for after the meal, what about girls? I know a bar where university students in miniskirts wait on tables to supplement their stipends. Some of them are not against supplementing the supplements.”

“We’ll save the girls for my next trip to Prague, Radek.” Martin took a last drag on the Beedie and embedded the burning end in the sand of an ashtray. “After the mom and pop’s crackle in the wall, I want to go to”—he hauled out the envelope that Taletbek Rabbani had given him in London and looked at what the old man had written on the back of it—“to the Vyshrad Train Station on Svobodova street.”

“The Vyshrad Station was shut closed by the communists. Trains pass there but do not stop. For a while it was an abandoned building where you could buy drugs. I am hearing it was hired to Czech people who buy and sell.”

“Buy and sell what?”

Radek shrugged. “Only God knows and He has so far not shared the information with me.”

“I want to know, too. I want to find out what they buy and sell.”

Radek fitted his deerstalker back onto his head at a rakish angle. “Then please to follow me, Mister.”

The hotel in the Vyshrad quarter turned out to be spotlessly clean and inexpensive if you didn’t formally register and paid two nights in advance with American dollars, which Martin immediately agreed to do. And the narrow fire staircase led, four floors down, to the kitchen and a back door giving onto a courtyard that gave onto a side street. The central post office, reached after a short ride on a red-and-cream double trolley, had a window for international calls. Martin jotted the Crown Heights phone number on a pad and waited his turn and squeezed into the empty booth that smelled of stale cologne when his ticket was called.

“Hello,” he cried into the phone when he heard Stella’s voice breasting the static on the other end.

“Why are you shouting?” she demanded.

He lowered his voice. “Because I’m farther away than the last time I called.”

“Don’t tell me where you are—there’s been a bizarre echo on my line the last few days.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Martin said. “They’ll take two or three minutes to figure out it’s an international call. Then they’ll need two or three days to find out which city it came from. And another week to get the local spooks to determine I’m calling from the central post office in Prague.”

“Now you’ve gone and told them.”

“They won’t believe me. They’ll think I’m planting phony clues to throw them off. What did you do with yourself today?”

“Just came back from the dentist—he’s making me a new front tooth.”

“Money down the drain. I liked the chipped tooth. Made you look …”

“Finish what you started to say, for God’s sake. Every time you get personal you let go of the end of the sentence and it drifts off like a hot air balloon.”

“Breakable. That’s the word that was on the tip of my tongue.”

“I’m not sure how to take that. What’s so great about looking breakable.”

“For starters, means you’re not already broken. People who are broken have several selves. Estelle is your real name, isn’t it?”

“The family name, Kastner, was assigned to us when we came to America. They wanted to change my first name, too, but I wouldn’t let them. Estelle is me.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “You still there?”

“I’m thinking about what you said. I know I must have met people who aren’t living in legends, I just don’t remember when.”

“Legends, as in having different names?”

“It’s much more than different names; it has to do with having several biographies, several attitudes, several ways of looking at the world, several ways of giving and taking pleasure. It has to do with being so broken that the king’s horses and the king’s men would have a hard time putting you together again.”

“Listen up, Martin—”

“Terrific! Now they’ll know it’s me calling.”

“How can they be sure I’m not using a phony name to throw them off?”

“There’s something in what you say.”

“I lied to you the last time we spoke. I said if I joined you in Europe there wouldn’t be strings attached. If you let me come, there will be. Strings attached.”

Martin didn’t know what to say. He stifled the uh-huh and let the silence stand.

“You don’t know what to say,” Stella guessed.

“Strings are attached to puppets,” Martin finally said. “It’s not an image of you that I put much store in.”

“The strings wouldn’t be attached to me or you, they’d be attached to my coming over. Remember when we were going into Israel and I told that policeman you were my lover?”

Martin smiled to himself. “And I told him you had a tattoo of a Siberian night moth under your right breast.”

“Got one,” Stella announced.

He didn’t understand. “Got what?”

“Tattoo of a Siberian night moth under my right breast. A Jamaican tattoo artist on Empire Boulevard did it. That’s the string that’s attached when we next meet. I’m going to have to show it to you to prove it’s there, since it’s not your style to take my word for something as important as that. Then we’ll see if one thing leads to another.”

Martin thought of the whore Dante had come across in Beirut. “I heard of a girl who actually had a moth tattooed under her breast. Her name was Djamillah. Did you really get one?”

He could hear the laughter in her voice. “Uh-huh.”

“Stealing my uh-huhs,” Martin said.

“Plan to steal more than that,” she shot back.

He changed the subject. “I was scared today.”

“Of what?”

“Where I’m at I’ve never been to before. That frightens me.”

“Okay, here’s the deal. You better get used to being where you’ve never been to before. I’ll hold your hand. Okay?”

“I suppose so.”

“If this is you enthusiastic, I’d hate to see you reluctant.”

“Fact is, I’m not sure.”

“Ever hear the story of the Russian peasant who was asked if he knew how to play the violin? I’m not sure, he replied. Never tried.” She snickered at her own joke. “You need to try, Martin, to know if you can or you can’t.”

“I can see you’re right. I just don’t feel you’re right.”

She digested that. “Why did you call me?”

“Wanted to hear your voice. Wanted to make sure you’re still you.”

“Well, you’ve heard it and I’ve heard yours. Where does that leave us, Martin?”

“I’m not sure.” They both laughed at the I’m not sure. “I mean, I still have to find the person who went AWOL from his marriage.”

“Let it go. Forget Samat. Come home, Martin.”

“If I let it go, the person who came home wouldn’t be me. Aside from that, lot of questions are out trawling for answers.”

“When the answers are elusive you have to learn to live with the questions.”

“I need to go. Stella?”

“Okay, okay, go. I’ll replay the conversation in my head after you hang up. I’ll sift through it looking for meanings I missed.”

“Don’t worry, be happy.”

“Don’t worry, be happy? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s a song from the top ten in the late eighties. Thought of it today—they were playing it over and over on a jukebox in Paraguay when a guy I know was there.”

“Was the they a girl?”

“A bunch of girls. Prostitutes working a bar who bought lottery tickets from an old Polish gentleman.”

“You depress me, Martin. There’s so much about you I don’t know.”

“I depress me, too. For the same reason.”

The plat du jour at the mom and pop’s turned out to be spicy Yugoslav meatballs served in soup dishes with vegetables that had been overcooked and were difficult to identify. Martin exchanged his meatballs for Radek’s vegetables and helped himself to half the boiled potatoes. The wine was a kissing cousin to Greek ouzo, flavored with anise and easy to drink once the first few mouthfuls numbed your throat. Radek sat across the small table from Martin, mopping up the sauces in his soup dish with pieces of stale bread and washing them down with gulps of wine. “My dream is to go to U.S. the beautiful before Alzheimer’s sets in,” he confided, sucking on a tooth to free the food caught in his gums. “Is it so that they pave the streets with Sony Walkmans when the cobblestones wear out?”

Martin leaned back and treated himself to an after-dinner Beedie. “Where did you pick up that juicy detail?”

“It was written in a university satirical magazine.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in university satirical magazines. Can you ask for the bill.”

Radek studied the bill when it came, then got into an argument with the owner, who wound up crossing out two items and reducing the price of the wine. “I saved you sixty crowns, which is two lousy U.S. dollars,” Radek noted. “That adds up to two hours of my honorarium, Mister. So where to now?”

“A trolley to Svobodova Street.”

“How is it a rich U.S. like you does not hire taxi cabs?”

“I have a theory that you don’t really know a city until you’ve ridden its public transportation.”

Radek rolled his head from side to side in dismay. “Here all the people who take public transportation dream to take private transportation. You want to go to the Vyshrad Station?”

“I would like to get off a hundred meters before it and walk the rest of the way to work off the meal.”

Radek laid a forefinger along a nostril. “You want to case the joint first.”

“Where did you pick up case the joint?”

“So I am crazy about old U.S. movies.” He transformed a thumb and an index finger into a pistol and jammed it into the pocket of his Tyrolean jacket. “I have a gub in my pocket, Mister.”

“What movie is that from?”

“Woody Allen. Take the Money and Run.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s go.”

Sitting in the back of the trolley, listening to the sparks crackling off the overhead electric cable, Martin studied the faces around him looking for the one that was conspicuously uninterested in him. Normally he prided himself on being able to blend into a crowd even when there wasn’t one. Now, however, he was in too much of a hurry to take the usual precautions. His American clothes, especially his shoes, made him stand out in any Czech crowd and people, naturally curious, would inspect him, some openly, some furtively. Martin figured if someone were following him he would be careful not to look at him at all. In the long ride from the mom and pop’s eatery to Mala Strana, then queuing to wait for a trolley on another line, Martin, still an artisan of tradecraft, didn’t have the feeling he was being tailed. Which, he knew from experience, could mean that the people following him were very good at it. Radek noticed him noticing the passengers around him. “If you are not wanting girls, what are you wanting?” he asked. He leaned closer so the haggard woman on the aisle seat brazenly scrutinizing the American couldn’t overhear him. “Cannabis, ganja, hemp, hashish, bhang, sinsemilla, cocaine, crack, angel dust, horse, methadone, LSD, PCP, uppers, downers. Only identify it, Radek will find it for less lousy U.S. dollars than you pay me a day.”

“I’ve never even heard of half these things,” Martin said. “What I’m wanting is to stretch my legs when we’re within walking distance of the Vyshrad Station.”

“Next stop,” Radek said, obviously disappointed that his procurement talents were not being put to the test. He plucked at the cord running the length of the trolley above the windows as if it were a guitar string. Up front a bell sounded. As the trolley ground to a halt, the doors scraped open. Once on the sidewalk, Radek pointed with his nose. In the distance, on the other side of the wide street, Martin could make out a shabby communist gothic structure trapping the last quarter hour of sunlight slanting in over the Vltava on its dilapidated roof, which was crawling with pigeons. He turned to Radek and offered his hand. “I won’t be needing your services anymore,” he announced.

Radek looked dejected. “You paid for ten hours, Mister. I still owe you seven and a half.”

“Consider the unused hours a gratuity.” When Radek still didn’t shake hands, Martin brought his own up to his eye and snapped off a friendly salute. “Good luck to you in medical school, Radek. I hope you find a cure for Alzheimer’s before Alzheimer’s sets in.”

“I kick myself for asking someone like you only thirty lousy crowns an hour,” Radek muttered as he turned and headed in the opposite direction.

Sucking on a Beedie, Martin strolled down Svobodova Street in the direction of the river. He passed a row of apartment buildings, one with the date “1902” etched over the door and a “Flat for Sale” sign in English on the inside of a ground floor window. Across the street loomed the Vyshrad Station in all its communist-era decadence. The station consisted of a central carcass and two broken wings. Dirty white stucco peeled away from the facade like sunburnt skin, exposing the dirty red bricks beneath. The windows on the Svobodova side were boarded over, though there were hints of fluorescent light seeping between the cracks in several of the second-floor windows that weren’t well jointed. The pigeons, in twos and threes, were fluttering away from the roof in search of the last rays of sun as Martin made his way back up Svobodova, this time on the station side of the street. Trolleys clattered by, causing the ground to tremble underfoot. Behind the station a commuter train sped past in the direction of Centrum. Dog-eared posters advertising Hungarian vacuum cleaners and reconditioned East German Trabants were thumb tacked to the boards covering the ground floor windows. Near the gate leading to a path around the side of the left wing of the station, someone had chalked graffiti on the wall: The Oklahoma City bomb was the first shot of World War III. Martin eased open the gate on its rusty hinges, climbed the brick steps and walked around to the back of the station. The passage was obviously in daily use because the weeds and vines on either side had been cut away from the brick footpath. Making his way along what used to be the platform when the station had been in use, Martin glanced into one of the wings through a sooty window shielded by rusting metal bars. Inside, two young men whom he took to be gypsies, wearing vests and corduroy trousers tucked into the tops of leather boots, were emptying large cartons and setting out what looked like packets of medicines on a long trestle table. Two young women dressed in long colorful skirts were repacking the items into smaller boxes and sealing them with masking tape. One of the young men caught sight of Martin and gestured with his thumb toward the main station doors further down the platform. Martin nodded and, a moment later, pushed through the double door into the station’s onceornate central hall, fallen into dilapidation and smelling of wet plaster, evidence that someone had tried to patch over the worst of the building’s wounds. A broken sign over the door read “Vychod—Exit.” The tiles on the floor, many of them cracked, shifted under his feet. A wide stairway curled up toward the second floor. Painted on the wall above the stairway were the words “Soft” and “Shoulder.” A squat dog with a blunt nose stood on the top landing, yelping in a hoarse voice at the intruder. A handsome, elegantly dressed woman in her fifties peered down from the railing. “If you are looking for Soft Shoulder, do come up,” she called. “Don’t mind the dog. His bite is worse than his bark, but I will lock him up.” Reaching for the dog’s leash, the woman pulled him, still yelping, into a room and shut the door. With the dog barking behind the door she turned back toward Martin, who was leaning on the banister to take the weight off his game leg as he climbed toward her. A half dozen thin Indian bracelets jangled on her thin wrist as she held out a slender hand. “My name is Zuzana Slánská,” she said as Martin took her hand.

He noticed that her fingers were weedy, her nails bitten to the quick, her eyes rheumy. He suspected that the wrinkled smile on her gaunt lips had been worn too many times without laundering. “Mine’s Odum,” he said. “Martin Odum.”

“What African country are you buying for?”

Figuring he had nothing to lose, Martin said the first thing that came into his head. “The Ivory Coast.”

“We don’t often deal with clients in person, Mr. Odum. Most of our business is mail order. As a matter of record, who sent you to us?”

“An associate of Samat’s named Taletbek Rabbani.” He produced the back of the envelope with Rabbani’s barely legible scrawl on it and showed it to the woman.

A shadow passed over her face. “News of Mr. Rabbani’s death reached us earlier this week. When and where did you meet him?”

“The same place you met him—at his warehouse behind the train station in the Golders Green section of London. I was probably the last person to see him alive—not counting the Chechens who murdered him.”

“The small item in the British newspaper made no mention of Chechens.”

“It may be that Scotland Yard doesn’t know this detail. It may be they know it but do not want to tip their hand.”

Smiling nervously, the woman led Martin into a large oval room lit by several naked neon fixtures suspended from the ceiling. The three windows in the office were covered with planking, reminding Martin of the time Dante Pippen had followed Djamillah into the mercantile office above the bar in Beirut—the windows there had been boarded over, too. He looked around, taking in the room. Large cartons with “This Side Up” stenciled on them were stacked against one wall. A young woman in a loose fitting sweater and faded blue jeans sat at a desk, typing with two fingers on a vintage table-model Underwood. At the edge of the desk, a scroll of facsimile paper spilled from a fax machine into a carton on the floor. A loose-leaf book lay open on a low glass table filled with coffee stains and overflowing ashtrays. The woman motioned Martin to a seat on the automobile banquette against the wall and settled onto a low three-legged stool facing him, her crossed ankles visible through the thick glass of the table. “I assume Mr. Rabbani explained how we operate here. In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we do business out of this defunct station to reduce the overhead and we only sell our generic medicines in bulk. Is there anything in particular you are looking for, Mr. Odum? Our best sellers are the Tylenol generic, acetaminophen, the Valium generic, diazepam, the Sudafed generic, pseudoephedrine, the Kenacort generic, triamcinolone. Please feel free to thumb through the loose-leaf catalogue. The labels of our generic medicines are pasted onto the pages. I am not aware of any particular epidemic threatening the Ivory Coast aside from the HIV virus—we unfortunately do not yet have access to generic drugs for AIDS, but hope governments will put pressure on the drug conglomerates …” She gazed at her visitor, a sudden question visible in her eyes. “You didn’t mention your medical credentials, Mr. Odum. Are you a trained doctor or a public health specialist?”

Another commuter train roared by behind the station. When it had passed, Martin said, “Neither.”

Zuzana Slánská’s fingers came up to touch the small Star of David attached to the chain around her neck. “I am not sure I comprehend you.”

Martin leaned forward. “I have a confession to make. I am not here to buy generic medicines.” He looked directly into her rheumy eyes. “I have come to find out more about Samat’s project concerning the exchange of the bones of the Lithuanian saint for the Jewish Torah scrolls.”

“Oh!” The woman glanced at the secretary typing up order forms across the room. “It’s a long story,” she said softly, “and I shall badly need a brandy and several cigarettes to get me through it.”

Zuzana Slánská leaned toward Martin so that he could light her cigarette with a match from the book advertising Prague crystal. “I have never smoked a Beedie before,” she noted, sinking back, savoring the taste of the Indian cigarette. She pulled it from her mouth and carefully examined it. “Is there marijuana mixed with the tobacco?” she asked.

Martin shook his head. “You’re smelling the eucalyptus leaves.”

She took another drag on the Beedie. “I am wary of the experts who argue so passionately that smoking is dangerous for your health,” she remarked, the words emerging from her mouth along with the smoke. As she turned away to glance at the two fat men sucking on thick cigars at a nearby table, it struck Martin that she had the profile of a woman who must have been a stunner in her youth. “There are a great many things dangerous for your health,” she added, turning back. “Don’t you agree?”

Concentrating on his own cigarette, Martin said, “For instance?”

“For instance, living under high tension wires. For instance, eating fast food with artificial flavoring. For instance, being right when your government is wrong.” She favored the old waiter with a worn smile as he carefully set out two snifters half-filled with three-star Jerez brandy, along with a shallow Dresden bowl brimming with peanuts. “I am speaking from bitter experience,” she added, “but you surely will have grasped that from the tone of my voice.”

She had led him on foot across the river to the salon du thé on the top floor of a gaudy hotel that had only recently opened for business. From the window next to the table at the back of the enormous room, Martin could see what he’d spotted from the plane: the hills rimming Prague and the communist-era apartment buildings spilling over them. “My husband,” the woman was saying, caught up in her own story, “was a medical doctor practicing in Vinohrady, which is a district of Prague behind the museum. I worked as his nurse. The two of us joined a literary circle that met once a week to discuss books. Oh, I can tell you, it was an exhilarating time for us. My husband was fearless—he used to all the time joke that old age was not for the weak of heart.” She gulped down some of the brandy and puffed furiously on her Beedie, as if time were running out; as if she had to relate her life’s story before her life ended. “Tell me if all this bores you to tears, Mr. Odum.”

“The opposite is true,” Martin assured her. “It mesmerizes me to tears.”

Zuzana Slánská hiked one slim shoulder inside her tailored Parisian jacket. “We were ardent Marxists, my husband and I. We were convinced it was the great Russian bear that had suffocated communism and not the other way around. Our Czech hero, Alexander Dubcek, was still a loyal party-line apparatchik when we began signing petitions demanding reforms. The Soviet-appointed proconsuls who reigned over us could not distinguish between dissidents who were anticommunist and those, like us, who were procommunist but argued that it had gone wrong; that it needed to be set right in order for Marxism to survive. Or if they did distinguish between us, they calculated that our form of dissidence was the more threatening of the two. And so we suffered the same fate as the others.”

Martin could see the muscles on her face contorting with heartache remembered so vividly that she seemed to be experiencing it now. “You must know the story,” she rushed on, barely bothering to breathe. “The one about the NKVD commissar admitting to Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin that a particular prisoner had refused to confess. Stalin considered the problem, then asked the commissar how much the state weighed, the state with all its buildings and factories and machines, the army with all its tanks and trucks, the navy with all its ships, the air force with all its planes. And then Stalin said, dear God, he said, Do you really think this prisoner can withstand the weight of the state?”

“Did you feel the weight of the state? Were you and your husband jailed?”

Zuzana Slánská had become so agitated that she began swallowing smoke and brandy in the same gulp. “Certainly we felt the weight of the state. Certainly we were jailed, some months at the same time and once even in the same prison, some months at different times so that we passed each other like ships in the night. I discovered that when you left prison you took the stench of it with you in your nostrils; it took months, years to get rid of it. Oh, once my husband returned from prison so beat up that I didn’t recognize him through the spy hole in the door and called the police to save me from a lunatic, and they came and looked at his identity card and told me it was safe to let him in, the lunatic in question was my husband. Does it happen in America, Mr. Odum, that the police must assure you it is safe to let your husband pass the door of your apartment? And then one day my husband was arrested for treating the broken ankle of a youth who turned out to be an anticommunist dissident hiding from the police. The journalists from America covering the trial pointed out in their stories that the same thing had happened to the American doctor who treated the broken ankle of A. Lincoln’s assassin.”

From some murky past—from some murky legend?—the story of the Prague trial surfaced in Martin’s memory. “You’re the wife of Pavel Slánský!”

“You recognize the name! You remember the trial!”

“Everyone who followed events in Eastern Europe was familiar with the name Pavel Slánský,” Martin said. “The Jewish doctor who was arrested for setting the broken ankle of a dissident; who at his trial pleaded innocent to that particular charge, but used the occasion to plead guilty to wanting to reform communism, explaining in excruciating detail why it needed reforming to survive. He was the forerunner of the reformers who came after him: Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, eventually Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.”

An uncontaminated smile, as fresh as laundered linen on a clothesline, materialized on Zuzana Slánská’s face. “Yes, he was ahead of his time, which in some countries is counted as a capital crime. The American authorities showed little sympathy for him—one suspects they did not want to see anyone attempt to reform communism, lest they succeed. My husband was declared to be an enemy of the state and condemned to ten years in prison for anticommunist activities. And I became like the poet Akhmatova, queuing at the prison guardhouse through the winters and springs and summers and falls to deliver packages of socks and soap and cigarettes addressed to prisoner 277103. The number is seared into my memory. The wardens took the packages and signed receipts promising they would be delivered. And then one day one of my packages was returned to me in the mail bearing the stamp Deceased, This tendency of bureaucracies in killer states to adhere to normal procedures and regulations has yet to be explained, at least to my satisfaction. In any case, that was how I discovered that my husband, the prisoner Slánský, was no longer among the living.” Zuzana Siánská raised a cold palm to swat away the cigar smoke drifting toward her from the nearby table. “May I have another of your amusing cigarettes? I need the eucalyptus to overpower the stench of their cigars. Oh, Mr. Odum, if one was able to put up with the inconveniences, I must tell you that dissidence was exhilarating.”

“Aside from prison, what were the inconveniences?”

“You lost your job, you were required to crowd into a fifty-square-meter apartment with the two couples already living in it, you were sent off to a psychiatric clinic to work out to the satisfaction of the state what made a dissident criticize something that was, by definition, perfect. When we would gather at an apartment late at night to discuss, oh, say, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, our small group considered all the angles, all the scenarios except the possibility that the gangsters who presided over the Soviet Union would become freelance gangsters presiding over the territory they had staked out when communism collapsed. Looking back, I can see now that we were incredibly naive. We were blinded by the exhilaration—each time we made love we thought it might be the last time and this turned us into ardent lovers, until the day came when we had no one to make love to. And so we stopped, most of us, being lovers and became haters.”

“And the generic drugs—how did you get into that?”

“I was a trained nurse but, after the trial of my husband, no doctor dared employ me. For years I worked at menial tasks—cleaning medical offices after they shut for the day, removing garbage cans from the courtyards of apartment houses to the street before dawn so the trucks could empty them. Finally, when our own communists were expelled from power in 1989, I decided to do what my husband always dreamed of doing—sell generic medicines to the third world at the lowest possible prices. I met Samat during one of his first trips to Prague and told him about my idea. He accepted at once to fund it as a branch of an existing humanitarian enterprise called Soft Shoulder—it was with his money that we rented the Vyshrad Station and bought the first stocks of generic medicines. Now I eke out enough profit to employ four gypsies and a part-time secretary. I once attempted to reimburse Samat but he refused to accept money. It must be said, he is something of a saint.”

“I suppose it would take a saint to get involved in repatriating the bones of a saint,” Martin remarked.

“I can say that I was the one who first told Samat about the Jewish Torah scrolls in the Lithuanian church.” Her hand drifted up to her neck to finger the Star of David. “My older sister was deported during the war to a concentration camp in Lithuania. She managed to escape into the steppe and joined the communist partisans harassing the German rear. It was my sister—her partisan name was Rosa, after the German communist Rosa Luxemburg; her real name was Melka—who attempted to warn the Jews in the shtetls not yet overrun by the Germans and the einsatzsgruppen murderers who followed behind them. Few believed her—they simply did not imagine that the descendants of Goethe and Beethoven and Brahms were capable of the mass murder of an entire people. But in several of the shtetls the rabbis hedged their bets—they collected the sacred Torah scrolls and priceless commentaries, some of them many hundreds of years old, and gave them to a Lithuanian Orthodox bishop to hide in a remote church. After the war my sister passed on to me the name of this church—Spaso-Preobrazhenski Sabor, which means Church of the Transfiguration, in the town of Zuzovka, on the Neman River just inside Lithuania near the frontier with Belarus. When I told the story to Samat, he dropped what he was doing—Samat, who was not as far as I know Jewish, went directly to the church to recover the Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel. The Metropolitan of the diocese refused to give them back; refused even to sell them back when Samat offered him a large sum of money. The Metropolitan was willing, however, to trade the Torah scrolls for the relics of Saint Gedymin, who established the Lithuanian capital in Vilnius in thirteen hundred something. Saint Gedymin’s bones had been stolen from the church by German troops during the war. After years of inquiry, Samat was finally able to trace the bones of the saint to Argentina. They had been smuggled there by Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of the war and deposited in a small Orthodox church near the city of Córdoba. When the church refused to part with the bones of Saint Gedymin, Samat went to see a person he knew in the Argentine government; in the Defense Ministry, actually. Samat told me he had persuaded the Defense Ministry to repatriate the saintly relics to Lithuania—”

“In return for what?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. Samat mentioned that he’d been to see the people at the Argentine Defense Ministry. But he never told me what they wanted in exchange for the relics of Saint Gedymin.”

“When did he tell you about the Defense Ministry?”

“The last time he passed through Prague.”

“Yes, and when was that?”

“After he left Israel he went to London to see Taletbek Rabbani. From London he flew here to see me on his way to—”

Martin became aware that Zuzana Slánská’s rheumy eyes had focused on something over his shoulder. He noticed her fingers slipping the Star of David out of sight under the collar of her blouse as he twisted in his seat to see what she was looking at. Radek, holding his deerstalker over his solar plexus, his other hand buried in the pocket of the Tyrolean jacket, stood at the doors of the salon du thé surveying the clients. He spotted Zuzana Slánská and Martin across the room and pointed them out with one of the brims of his deerstalker as he started threading his way through the tables toward them. A dozen men in civilian suits fanned out behind him.

A gasp of pure dread escaped from Zuzana Slánská’s throat as she rose to her feet. She uttered the words, “Old age is not for the weak of heart,” then, her eyes fixed on Radek, her lips barely moving, she said: “There is an island in the Aral Sea twenty kilometers off the mainland called Vozrozhdeniye. During the Soviet era it was used as a bioweapons testing range. On the island is the town of Kantubek. Samat’s contact in Kantubek is a Georgian named Hamlet Achba. Can you remember all that?”

“Vozrozhdeniye. Kantubek. Hamlet Achba.”

“Warn Samat …” Radek was almost upon them. “Oh, it’s for sure I will not survive the stench of another prison,” she murmured to herself.

Around them the waiters and the clients had frozen in place, mesmerized by the progress of Radek and his companions toward the two customers at the small table in the back of the room. Radek, a faint smile of satisfaction disfiguring his lips, reached the table. “I have a gub in my pocket,” he informed Martin. “It is a German Walther P1. You are arrested, Mister. You, also, Misses, are arrested.”

Martin could feel the gentle rise and fall of the deck under his shoes (the laces, along with his belt, had been confiscated) as he waited for the interrogation to begin again. They had come for him at odd hours for the last several days, a technique designed to deprive him of sleep more than elicit information. As there was no porthole in his small cell immediately over the bilges of the houseboat or in the compartment above it, where the interrogations took place, he soon lost track of whether it was night or day. The only sound that reached his ears from outside were the foghorns of passing river ferries and the doppler-distorted shriek of sirens as police cruisers raced through the streets of Prague. From somewhere in the bowels of the houseboat came the dull throb of a generator; from time to time the bulb hanging out of reach over his head dimmed or brightened. Soon after Radek hustled him from the police van to the houseboat, which was tied to bollards on a cement quay down river from the Charles Bridge, he thought he caught the muted cry of a woman coming from another deck. When he re-created the sound in his head he decided it could have been the caterwaul of a cat prowling through the garbage bins on the quay. The grilling sessions in the airless compartment didn’t appear to fatigue the interrogator, a stooped, gaunt bureaucrat with an unshaven face and a shaven skull and an aquiline nose that looked as if it had been broken and badly set at some point in his life. Holding court from behind a small desk bolted to the planks of the deck, he fired off questions in a dispassionate monotone, only occasionally lifting his eyes from his notes. Radek, dressed now in a neat three-piece brown suit with narrow Austrian lapels, leaned against a bulkhead next to one of the two guards who escorted Martin to and from his cell. Martin sat facing the inquisitor on a chair whose front legs had been shortened so that the prisoner would feel as if he were constantly sliding off of it. Bright spotlights positioned on either side of the desk burned into his retinas, causing his eyes to tear and his vision to blur.

“Do you have a name?” Martin had asked the gaunt man behind the desk at the very first session.

The question appeared to have dismayed the interrogator. “What would it serve, your knowing my name?”

“It would permit me to identify you when I file a complaint with the American embassy.”

The interrogator had glanced at Radek, then looked back at Martin. “If you lodge a complaint, say that you were arrested by a secret unit attached to a secret ministry.”

From his place along the wall, Radek had choked off a guttural laugh.

Now the interrogator slid a small Pyrex percolator toward Martin. “Help yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the pot of coffee.

“You’ve spiked it with caffeine to keep me awake,” Martin said tiredly, but he poured some into a plastic cup and sipped it anyway; they had fed him salted rice and not provided drinking water since his arrival on the houseboat. “Your techniques of interrogation are right out of those old American movies that Radek here is so crazy about.”

“I do not deny it,” the interrogator said. “One must not be a snob when it comes to picking up tricks of the trade. In any case, it has been my experience that these techniques work in the end—I say this as someone who has been on both sides of the interrogation table. When I was arrested for anticommunist activities by the communists, in four days they were able to convince me to admit to crimes I had not committed using these very same techniques. And what has been your experience, Mr. Odum?”

“I have no experience with interrogations,” Martin said.

The interrogator sniggered skeptically. “That is not the impression your Central Intelligence Agency gave us. Their chief of station in Prague confides to us that you were once one of their paramount field operatives, someone so skilled at tradecraft it was said of you that you could blend into a crowd even in the absence of one.”

“If I were half that good, how come I fell for Radek’s pitch at the airport?”

The interrogator shrugged his stooped shoulders, which raised them for an instant to where they normally should have been. “Perhaps you are past your prime. Perhaps you were preoccupied with other thoughts at that particular moment. In any case, if you had not hired Radek—”

“For the equivalent of one lousy U.S. dollar an hour,” Radek groaned from the wall.

“If you had not hired him, you would surely have wound up in one of the three taxis we had positioned outside. The drivers, all of whom call themselves Radek, work for us.”

Martin identified a piece of the puzzle that was missing: How could Radek’s service have known he would turn up in Prague? Obviously the CIA chief of station had been talking to his Czech counterpart about Martin. And the chief of station reported to the Deputy Director of Operations, Crystal Quest. Which brought Martin back to what he’d told the late Oscar Alexandrovich Kastner in the windowless walk-in closet on President Street a lifetime ago: I’d like to know why the CIA doesn’t want this particular missing husband found.

“Your station chief,” the interrogator was saying, “claims you are no longer employed by the CIA. He says you are a freelance detective. It could be true, what he says; it could also be that they are simply denying any connection to you because you have been caught in the act. So tell me, Mr. Odum. What weapon systems were you contracting to buy at the Vyshrad Station. More importantly, who were you buying them for?”

“Zuzana Slánská sells generic medicines.”

“The woman you call Zuzana Slánská was never legally married to the doctor Pavel Slánský, who, as you surely know, was convicted as an enemy of the state during the communist period. Her real name is Zuzana Dzurova. She assumed the name Slánská when she learned of Pavel’s death in prison. As for the generic medicines, we have reason to believe they are a front for one of the most prolific weapons operations in Europe.” The interrogator pulled a report from one of the cardboard file boxes on the desk, pried a staple loose with his thumbnail and extracted the third page. He fitted on a pair of rimless reading glasses and began to quote from the text. “… operating in conjunction with Mr. Taletbek Rabbani in London, who claims to be selling prostheses at cost to third world countries …” The interrogator looked up from the paper. “It is surely not lost on you that both Mr. Rabbani’s prosthesis operation in London and Zuzana Slánská’s generic medicine operation here in Prague were funded by the same individual, a Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who until recently was living in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan River in order to shelter himself from the gang wars raging in Moscow.”

Martin’s muscles ached from the effort of keeping his body from sliding off the chair. He strained to bring the interrogator into focus. “Both Mr. Rabbani and Zuzana Slánská described Samat Ugor-Zhilov as a philanthropist—”

Radek emitted a single hiccup. “Some philanthropist!” he cried from the wall.

The interrogator threw Radek a dark look, as if to remind him that there was a pecking order; that birds on the junior end of it should be seen but not heard. Then, angling the sheet of paper toward the light, he began reading phrases from it. “Both Mr. Rabbani and Zuzana Slánská are marketing a French device that corrects the error the U.S. Pentagon builds into the satellite GPS system to thwart rogue missile launchings … Soviet-surplus radar units from the Ukraine … ah, yes, armored personnel carriers from a Bulgarian state-run company, Terem, sold to Syria for eventual delivery to Iraq … engines and spare parts for the T-55 and T-72 Soviet tanks from assorted Bulgarian armaments factories … ammunition, explosives, rockets, training manuals in missile technology from Serbia … spare jet-fighter parts and rocket propellants from an aviation factory in eastern Bosnia. And listen to this: The London prosthesis warehouse and the Prague generic medicine operation are used as clearing houses for orders for an ammunition factory in the town of Vitez and missile guidance systems fabricated in a research center in the city of Banja Luka … payments for items on the inventory were made in cash or in diamonds.” The interrogator flicked the nail of his middle finger against the sheet of paper. “I could continue but there is no point.”

In one of his legends—Martin couldn’t recall which—he remembered taking a course at the Farm designed to prepare agents in the field for hostile interrogation. The various techniques of interrogation discussed included one where the interrogator would invent flagrant lies to disorient the person being questioned. Agents who found themselves in this predicament were advised to hang on to the facts they knew to be true and let the fictions of the interrogator pass without comment.

Martin, his head swimming with fatigue, heard himself say, “I know absolutely nothing about the sale of weapons.”

The interrogator removed his eyeglasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with the thumb and third finger of his left hand. “That being the case, what brought you to Mr. Taletbek Rabbani’s warehouse in London and the Vyshrad Station in Prague?”

Martin longed to stretch out on the metal army cot in his cell. “I am trying to trace Samat Ugor-Zhilov,” he said.

“Why?”

In disjointed sentences, Martin admitted that he had once been employed by the CIA; that it was perfectly true that he had set up shop as a private detective in Brooklyn, New York, after he left the service. He explained about Samat walking out on his wife in Israel, leaving her in a religious limbo; how the wife’s sister and father had hired him to track down Samat and convince him to give her a religious divorce so that she could get on with her life. “I have no interest in purchasing false limbs or generic drugs. I am simply following a trail that I hope leads to Samat.”

Smiling thinly, the interrogator humored Martin. “And what will you do once you find him?”

“I will take Samat to the nearest town that has a synagogue and oblige him to grant his wife a divorce in front of a rabbi. Then I will return to Brooklyn and spend the rest of my life boring myself to death.”

The interrogator turned Martin’s story over in his mind. “I am familiar with the school of intelligence activities that holds that a good cover story must be made to seem preposterous if it is to be believed. But you are pushing this thesis to its limits.” He rifled through the papers on the desk and came up with another report. “We have been observing people entering or leaving the Vyshrad Station for weeks now,” he continued. “We even managed to plant a listening device in the upstairs office. Here is a transcript of a very recent conversation. Perhaps it will seem familiar to you. A man was heard to say: I have a confession to make. I am not here to buy generic medicines. I have come to find out more about Samat’s project concerning the exchange of the bones of the Lithuanian saint for Jewish Torah scrolls.” The interrogator raised his eyes from the paper to look directly at his prisoner. “Curious that you make no mention of divorce before a rabbi. Bones of the Lithuanian saint, Jewish Torah scrolls—I take that to be coded references to weapons systems originating in Lithuania and Israel. I can tell you that, aside from the illegality of selling weapons and weapon systems, what intrigues us most about Mrs. Slánská is her motive. She was not doing it for money, Mr. Odum. She is an idealist.”

“Last time I checked, being an idealist was not a crime, even in the Czech Republic.”

“The American writer Mencken once defined an idealist as someone who, on observing that a rose smelled better than a cabbage, concluded that it would also make better soup. Yes, well, like Mencken’s idealist, Mrs. Slánská’s idealism is very particular—she remains a diehard Marxist, plotting the comeback of the communists. She desires to set the clock back and is thought to be using the considerable profits from the sale of weapons to finance a splinter group hoping to do here in the Czech Republic what the former communists have done in Poland and Rumania and Bulgaria: win elections and return to power.”

It occurred to Martin there might be a way to beat the fatigue that made it appear as if everything around him was happening in slow motion. He closed one eye, thinking that one lobe of his brain could actually sleep while the other eye and the other lobe remained awake. After a moment, hoping the interrogator wouldn’t catch on to his clever scheme, he switched eyes and lobes. He could hear the interrogator’s voice droning on; could make out, through his open eye, the blurred figure getting up and coming around to half sit on the desk in front of him.

“You arrived here from London, Mr. Odum. The British MI5 established that you lived for several days in a rooming house next to a synagogue off Golders Green. The warehouse where Mr. Taletbek Rabbani was murdered the day before you departed from London was within walking distance of your rooming house.”

“If everyone living within walking distance of the warehouse is a suspect,” the half of Martin’s brain still functioning managed to say, “MI5 is going to have its hands full.”

“We have not excluded the possibility of concluding a deal with you, Mr. Odum. Our principal objective is to discredit Mrs. Slánská; to show that she and Mr. Rabbani were in league with Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov’s weapons operation; that both the warehouse in London and the defunct train station in Prague were funded by the same Samat Ugor-Zhilov, a notable Moscow gangster who is associated with the Ugor-Zhilov known as the Oligarkh. The object for us is to tie the communist splinter group to Zuzana Slánská’s illegal weapons operation and discredit them once and for all … Mr. Odum, are you hearing me? Mr. Odum? Mr. Odum, wake up!”

But both lobes of Martin’s brain had yielded to exhaustion.

“Take him back to his cell.”

Once, several incarnations back, Dante Pippen had barely survived an interminable bus trip that took him from a CIA safe house in a middle class neighborhood of Islamabad (furnished, for once, not in ancient Danish modern but in modern Pakistani kitsch) to Peshawar and the tribal badlands of the Khyber Pass, where he spent the better part of a year debriefing fighters infiltrating into and out of Afghanistan. The bus trip (Crystal Quest’s notion of how an Irish reporter working for a wire service—Dante’s cover at the time—would travel) had turned out to be a nightmare. Squeezed onto the wooden bench at the back of the bus between a mullah from Kandahar wearing a filthy shalwar kameez and a bearded Kashmiri fighter in a reeking djellaba, Dante had been eternally grateful when the bus pulled up, sometimes smack in the middle of nowhere, other times on the sewage-saturated streets of what passed for a village, to let the passengers stretch their legs, reckon the direction of Mecca and murmur the verses of the Koran a Muslim is required to recite five times a day. Now, slouching on the plush banquette in the back of the air-conditioned double-deck tourist bus, surrounded by well-dressed and, more importantly, well-scrubbed Germans on their way home from the spa at Karlovy Vary, Martin Odum suddenly thought of Dante’s Khyber trip and the memory brought a smile to his lips. As always, remembering a detail from Dante’s past reminded Martin that he, too, must have had a past, and this gave him a measure of hope that he could one day retrieve it. He patted the Canadian passport in the inside breast pocket of his jacket in anticipation of arriving at the Czech-German frontier. This particular passport, one of several he’d swiped from a safe when he was clearing out his office after being dismissed from the CIA, had been issued to a resident of British Columbia named Jozef Kafkor, a name Martin didn’t recognize but found easy to remember because it reminded him of Franz Kafka and his stories of anguished individuals struggling to survive in a nightmarish world, which was more or less how Martin saw himself. Lulled by the motion of the bus and the ticking of its diesel engine, Martin closed his eyes and dozed, reliving the events of the last twelve hours.

He could hear Radek’s voice whispering in his ear. Please, Mr. Odum, you must wake up.

Martin had drifted up toward the mirrored surface of consciousness in carefully calibrated increments, a deep sea diver rising languidly to avoid the bends. When he finally located the appropriate muscles and worked his lids open, he had discovered Radek, dressed again in jodhpurs and the Tyrolean jacket, crouching next to the metal army cot in his cell. “For the love of God, wake up, Mr. Odum.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Four, four and a half hours.”

Martin had struggled stiffly into a sitting position on the cot, with his back against the wooden bulkhead. “What time is it?”

“Twenty to six.”

“Antemeridian or postmeridian?”

“Before dawn. Are you able to focus on what I say? The guards on the quay, the staff on the houseboat have been sent home. People in high places want you to vanish into thin air.” He handed Martin his shoes, both of which had laces, along with his belt. “Put these on. Follow me.”

Radek led Martin up the metal staircase to the weather deck. In a tiny room next to the midships passageway, he returned his Aquascutum and valise, which he had retrieved from the bed and breakfast. Martin snapped open the valise and touched the white silk scarf folded on top of the clothes. He ran his fingers across the underside of the lid.

“Your false papers, as well as your dollars and English pounds, are where you hid them, Mr. Odum.”

Martin regarded Radek warily. “You provide a great deal for thirty lousy crowns an hour.”

There was a flicker of pain in Radek’s eyes. “I am not the man I appear to be,” he whispered. “I am not the person my superiors take me for. I did not rebel in my youth against the communists to serve so-called state capitalists who use the same methods. I refuse to be complicit with criminals.” He pulled the German Walther P1 with a clip inserted in it from a pocket of his Tyrollean jacket and offered it to Martin, butt first. “At least you are forewarned.”

Thoroughly confused, Martin took the weapon. “Forewarned and forearmed.”

“I was instructed to release you at fifteen minutes to seven. I surmise that your body would have been found floating in the Vltava. Your valise, filled with American dollars and British pounds and false identity papers, would have been recovered from the quay. The authorities would have speculated that a suspicious American, involved in the illegal sale of weapons and weapons systems, had been murdered by international gangsters. A small item to that effect would have appeared in the local newspapers. The American embassy would give the matter superficial attention—your CIA station chief might even hint that the national interest would be better served if they did not dig too deeply into the affair. With the ink still wet on the various reports, the case would be closed.”

“A quarter to seven—that gives me less than an hour,” Martin noted.

“My automobile, a gray Skoda, is parked fifty meters down the quay. The gas tank is full, the keys are in the ignition. Drive along the quay until you come to the first ramp leading to the street, then cross the river at the first bridge you come to and head due south, following the signposts to Ceské Budjovice and beyond that, Austria. If they stop you at the frontier, use one of your false passports. The whole trip should take you about two hours if you do not meet too much traffic.”

“If I’m running, I want to take Zuzana Slánská with me.”

“Her life is not in danger. Yours is. She faces a prison sentence if the evidence is sufficient to convict her.”

Martin was worried about Radek. “How will you explain that your handgun is missing?”

“I would take it as a service if you would strike my head above the ear hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. They will find me only just beginning to regain consciousness. I will claim that you overpowered me. They will have their doubts—I will certainly be demoted, I may even lose my employment. So what. I resist, therefore I am.”

The two men shook hands. “I hope our paths cross again,” Martin said.

Radek flashed a sheepish grin. “Be warned, Mister—next time I will not be such a fool as to settle for one lousy U.S. dollar an hour.”

Gritting his teeth, Radek shut his eyes and angled his head. Martin didn’t stint—he knew Radek stood a better chance of talking his way out of trouble if the head wound were real. Gripping the handgun by the barrel, wincing in empathy, he forced himself to swipe the butt sharply across the young man’s scalp, drawing blood, stunning Radek, who slumped onto his knees.

“Thank you for that,” he groaned.

“It was not my pleasure,” Martin observed.

He collected his belongings and made his way across the gangplank to the quay, which appeared deserted. Radek’s Skoda was parked in the shadows to his left. He went to the car and opened the door and threw his belongings onto the passenger seat. When he turned the key in the ignition, the motor started instantly. He checked the gas gauge—it was full, just as Radek had said. He threw the car into gear and started down the quay. He’d gone about half a kilometer when his headlights fell on the ramp leading to the street. Suddenly Martin’s foot went to the brake. Killing the headlights, he pulled the car into the shadows at the side of the quay. He sat there for a moment, shaken by the pulse pounding in his ear. An old instinct had triggered an alarm in the lobe of his brain that specialized in tradecraft. He retrieved the German handgun from the pocket of his jacket, removed the clip, flicked the first of the icy 9-millimeter Parabellum bullets into the palm of his hand and hefted it.

He caught his breath. The bullet looked real enough. But it was too light!

Contrary to what the interrogator had said, Martin was not past his prime!

Checking out the bullets in a handgun was a piece of tradecraft Dante Pippen had picked up during a brief stint with a Sicilian Mafia family. When you gave someone a handgun, or left one where it was sure to be found, there was always the danger that it could be turned against you. In Sicily it was indoor sport to plant handguns loaded with dummy bullets that looked and (if you pulled the trigger) sounded like real bullets. But dummy bullets didn’t have the same weight as real bullets—someone familiar with handguns could sense the difference.

Radek had set him up for a fall.

Martin remembered the pained look in the young man’s eyes; he could hear his voice, oozing sincerity, delivering his manifesto: I am not the man I appear to be.

Who amongst us is the man he appears to be?

Martin thought about going back to liberate Zuzana Slánská. But he quickly abandoned the idea—if he returned to the houseboat for her now, they would know that he’d figured out the scheme. And they would fall back on Plan B, which was bound to be less subtle but more immediate.

Martin could imagine the scenario of Plan A: The prisoner, carrying multiple false identity papers and arrested in the company of an arms dealer, overpowers his guard, swipes his handgun and escapes from the safe house where he is being questioned, heading for Austria. Somewhere along the route, or perhaps at the border crossing itself, he is stopped for a routine passport control. In front of witnesses he produces the gun and tries to shoot his way out of a tight spot, at which point he is gunned down by uniformed police. Open and shut case of self defense. Happens all the time in the former Soviet wastelands of Europe these days.

Knowing that Radek had been setting him up for a hit, Martin certainly didn’t want to use the Skoda, though if he parked it on a side street, where it could go unnoticed for hours or even for days, the authorities might spend precious time looking for Radek’s car on the highways leading south. Once he ditched the Skoda (he would throw the handgun in the river but leave the bullets on the driver’s seat to taunt Radek), the quickest way out of the country was the best: There were trains departing all through the day for Karlovy Vary, the spa in the northwestern corner of the country a long stone’s throw from the German frontier. And there were double-decker tourist busses heading back to Germany from Karlovy Vary by the dozens every afternoon; even under the communist regime it had been possible to bribe one of the bus drivers to take you across the border. If the frontier guards verified identities, he could use the Canadian passport that he’d stashed in the tattered lining of his Aquascutum. Checking the lining again, he felt there was a good possibility that Radek had not discovered that one.

The driver’s tinny voice, coming from small speakers in the roof of the tourist bus, stirred Martin from his reverie. “Bereitet Eure Pässe, wir werden an der Grenze sein.” Up ahead he could make out the low flat-roofed wooden buildings that housed the money changers and the toilets, and beyond that the border guards in brown uniforms and berets. There was one tourist bus ahead of theirs and three behind, which Martin knew was a stroke of luck; the guards tended toward cursory inspections at rush hours. When it was the turn of his bus, a young officer with a harassed expression on his face climbed onto the bus and walked down the aisle, glancing at faces more than the open passports, looking for Arabs or Afghans surely. Sitting on the banquette, Martin opened the passport to the page with his photo and, smiling pleasantly, held it out, but the young officer barely gave it, or him, a second glance. When the bus started up again and eased across the red stripe painted across the highway, the German passengers, relieved to be back in civilization, broke into a raucous cheer.

Martin didn’t join in the celebration. He was having second thoughts about leaving Zuzana Slánská in the clutches of the devious Radek. In his mind’s eye he could visualize the weight of the state crushing the breath out of her brittle body.

Standing on the fo’c’sle, Radek had watched the red taillights grow dimmer as the Skoda made its way along the quay toward the ramp. When the lights brightened and the car braked to a stop, the interrogator, standing next to him and peering through binoculars, grunted in irritation. Moments later, when the taillights finally started up the ramp and disappeared on the street above the quay, the two men clasped hands to salute a scheme well hatched. The interrogator flicked back the sleeve of his leather jacket to look at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. “I will alert our people that the American is on his way south,” he said. “The Oligarkh has wired instructions to our ministry—he wants the trail to Samat to end at the Slánská woman.”

Radek, pressing a handkerchief to his head wound to stop the bleeding, took out a small flashlight and signalled with it in the direction of the green garbage bin down the quay from the houseboat. Moments later the two heavies who had escorted Martin to and from his cell appeared on the gangplank. Radek motioned for them to follow him as he headed for the small cell two decks under the bow. They found Zuzana Slánská sitting on her metal cot, her eyes swollen with fear, her legs tucked under her body, her arms hugging the blanket over her shoulders despite the absence of a breath of air in the room. “Is it time for another interrogation already?” she asked, her fingers toying with the Star of David at her neck as she unwound from the sitting position on the cot and stood up. Instead of waving her through the door, the two guards positioned themselves on either side of the woman and gripped her arms above the elbows. Zuzana’s eyes widened as Radek stepped forward and wrenched her blouse out of the waistband, baring her stomach. When she caught sight of the small syringe in his hand, she struggled to break free, but the two men only tightened their holds on her arms. Thoroughly terrified, Zuzana began to sob silently as Radek jabbed the needle into the soft flesh of her navel and depressed the plunger. The drug took effect rapidly—within seconds Zuzana’s eyelids drooped, then her chin fell forward onto her chest. While the two heavies held her up, Radek produced a small pocket knife and began cutting strips from the blanket on the cot. He twisted the strips into cords and tied two of them end to end. Then he dragged the metal cot into the center of the cell under the light bulb and, climbing up on the bed, attached one end of the makeshift cord to the electric wire above the bulb. He pulled on it to make sure it would hold. The heavies hauled Zuzana’s limp body onto the cot under the bulb and held her up while Radek fashioned a noose and tightened it around the woman’s neck. Then he jumped free of the cot and kicked it onto its side and the three men stepped back and watched Zuzana’s body twisting slowly at the end of the cord. Radek grew impatient and motioned with a finger—one of the heavies grabbed her around the hips and added his weight to hers to speed up the execution. Clucking his tongue, Radek rolled his head from side to side in mock grief. “It is clearly not the state’s responsibility if you turned out to be suicidal,” he informed the woman strangling to death in the middle of the room.

Crystal Quest’s features clouded over as she fitted on narrow spectacles and read the deciphered “Eyes Only” action report from Prague Station that her chief of staff had deposited on the blotter. The two wallahs who had been briefing her on the mass graves recently uncovered in Bosnia exchanged looks; they had lived through enough of the DDO’s mood swings to recognize storm warnings when they saw them. Quest slowly looked up from the report. For once she seemed tongue-tied.

“When did this come in?” she finally asked.

“Ten minutes ago,” the chief of staff replied. “Knowing your interest, I thought I’d walk it through instead of rout it.”

“Where did they find the Skoda?”

“On one of those narrow cobblestoned streets on the Hradcany Castle side of the river.”

“When?”

“Twelve hours ago, which was a day and a half after the Czechs watched him drive off down the quay.”

The wallahs slumped back in their chairs and gripped the arm rests to better breast the storm. To their utter surprise, a cranky grin crept over Quest’s crimson lips.

“I love that son of a bitch,” she whispered harshly. “Where did they find the bullets?”

The chief of staff couldn’t help smiling, too. “On the front seat of the car,” he said. “Six 9-millimeter Parabellums set out in a neat row. They never found the handgun.”

Quest slapped at the action report with the palm of her hand. To the attending wallahs it came across as applause. “Naturally they never found the handgun. He would have deep-sixed it in the Vltava. Oh, he’s good, he is.”

“He ought to be,” agreed the chief of staff. “You trained him.”

Quest was rolling her head from side to side in satisfaction. “I did, didn’t I. I trained him and ran him and repaired him when he broke and ran him again. Some legends back, when we were playing Martin as Dante Pippen, I remember him coming in from a stint with that Sicilian Mafia family that was offering to sell Sidewinders to the Sinn Féin diehards in Ireland. He had us all in stitches telling us about how the Sicilians left pistols lying around where anybody could pick them up and shoot them. The catch was they were loaded with dummy bullets, which weighed less than real bullets if you took the trouble to heft them in your palm. Dante”—Quest started giggling and had to catch her breath—“Dante wanted us to leave pistols loaded with dummy bullets lying around Langley. He was only half kidding. He said it would be a quick way to separate the street-smart agents from the street-dumb ones.”

“They may still find him if he went to ground in Prague,” observed the chief of staff.

“Dante isn’t in the Czech Republic,” Quest said flatly. “He would have found half a dozen ways of getting across their silly little border.”

“We’ll catch up with him,” the chief of staff promised.

But Quest, her head still bobbing with pleasure, was following her own thoughts. “I love the guy. I really do. What a goddamned shame we have to kill him.”

“I need to get this off my chest,” Stella said, cutting short the small talk. “I’ve never had an erotic phone relationship before.”

“I didn’t realize our conversations were erotic.”

“Well, they are. The fact that you call is erotic. The sound of your voice coming from God knows where is erotic. The silences where neither of us knows quite what to say, yet nobody wants to end the conversation, is endlessly erotic.”

They both listened to the hollow silence. “It is not written that we will ever become lovers,” Martin said finally. “But if we do, we must make love as if each time could be the last.”

His remark took her breath away. After a moment she said, “If we were to make love, I have the feeling time would stop in its tracks, death would cease to exist, God would become superfluous.” She waited for Martin to say something. When he didn’t she plunged on: “It exasperates me that we only just met—I lost so much time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Translate that, please.”

“Time is something you can’t lose,” Martin said. “Memory is another story.”

He listened to her breathing on the other end of the phone four thousand miles away. “Consider the possibility,” he said, “that we can talk intimately because of the distance between us—because the phone provides a measure of safety. Consider the possibility that the intimacy will evaporate when we come face to face.”

“No. No. I don’t think it will; I’m sure it won’t. Listen, before Kastner and I came to America I was in love with a Russian boy, or thought I was. I look back on it now as something that was pleasantly physical, as first loves tend to be, but not erotic. The two are a universe apart. My Russian boy friend and I talked constantly when we weren’t groping each other on some narrow bed in some narrow room. Thinking about it now, I remember endless strings of words that had no spaces between them. I remember conversations that were without silences. You know how you can split an atom and get energy. Well, you can do the same with words. Words contain energy. You can split them and harness the released energy for your love life. Are you still there, Martin? How do you interpret my love affair with the Russian boy?”

“It means you weren’t ready. It means you are now.”

“Ready for what?”

“Ready for naked truths, as opposed to crumbs of truth.”

“Funny you should say that. Do you know Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate? It’s a great Russian novel, one of the greatest, right up there with War and Peace. Somewhere in it Grossman talks about how you can’t live with scraps of truth—he says a scrap of truth is no truth at all.”

Martin said, “I’ve had to make do with scraps—maybe that’s what’s pushing me to find Samat. Maybe somewhere in the Samat story there’s a naked truth.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Not sure.” He laughed under his breath. “Intuition. Instinct. Hope against hope that the king’s horses and the king’s men can somehow put the pieces together again.”