1997: MARTIN ODUM IS ACCUSED OF HIGH AND LOW TREASON

LOOK, IF YOU PLEASE, DIRECTLY AHEAD OF US—THERE ARE THE hulls,” Almagul shouted over the din of the ancient Soviet outboard that was powering her eight-meter skiff across the Aral Sea toward Vozrozhdeniye Island. “Ten years ago there was a bay here with the port for Kantubek at the top of it. The ships you see became stranded when the rivers feeding the Aral Sea were diverted and the sea level sank.”

Martin shielded his eyes with a hand and squinted into the dazzling sunlight. He could make out the hulls of a tanker, a tug boat, a Soviet-era torpedo boat, eight ships in all, half sunken into the sand and the salt residue in what had once been a bay. “I see them,” he called to the girl.

“You must wear gloves now,” she shouted, and she raised a hand from the outboard tiller to show that she had already fitted hers on over the sleeves of the frayed fisherman’s sweater that buttoned across one shoulder. Martin pulled the yellow latex kitchen gloves over the cuffs of his shirt sleeves and attached thick rubber bands at the wrists of each of them. He knotted Dante’s white silk scarf around his neck for good luck and tucked his pants legs into the knee-length soccer stockings the girl had given him when they left the Amu Darya—one of the two rivers trickling into the Aral Sea—the night before. As the skiff drew closer to the salt beach a flock of white flamingoes, frightened by the clatter of the motor, beat into the air. Martin spotted the first buildings of Kantubek, now a deserted shell of a town except for the scavengers who came from the mainland to plunder what was left of the once grandiose Soviet bioweapon testing site. Almagul, something of a tomboy who claimed to be sixteen, though she easily might have been a year or two younger, had been coming here regularly with her father and her twin sister before they both died two years before—of a mysterious illness that had left them feverish, with swollen lymph glands and mucus running from their nostrils. (Before her sister’s death, Almagul had been known as Irina but, following local tradition, had taken the name of her twin sister, Almagul, to perpetuate her memory.) On the island, the father and his daughters would collect lead and aluminum and zinc-covered steel water pipes and copper wiring, as well as stoves and sinks and faucets and, when nothing else could be found, wooden planking pried up from the floors of buildings, and sell everything on the mainland to men who loaded the loot onto flatbed trucks and headed over the dusty plains toward Nukus or up to the city of Aral on the Kirgiz Steppe. Almagul hadn’t been back to Vozrozhdeniye since the death of her father and her sister but Martin, arriving on a Yak-40 milk from Tash Kent, learned that she was the only person in Nukus with a skiff and a working outboard who had been to the island. He tracked her down to a one-room shack at the edge of the river and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse—and then doubled it when he discovered she was studying English in the gymnasium and could translate for him as well. They had started down the Amu Darya loaded with spare jerry cans of gasoline and a straw hamper filled with camel-milk yogurt, goat cheese and watermelon.

“Over there is Kantubek,” the girl was shouting now as she veered toward a dune at the foot of the town and idled the motor to let the skiff glide onto the sandy shore. Martin scrambled onto the bow and jumped the last half-meter to shore and turned to haul the skiff higher onto the beach. Clearly emotional at this first trip back to the island since the death of her father, Almagul joined him and stood with her gloved hands on her hips, looking around anxiously. Her Soviet manufactured djeans, tied with a rope through the loops at the waist, were tucked into fisherman’s rubber boots secured at the tops with lengths of elastic. She kicked at broken test tubes and petri dishes half buried in the sand, and waved toward the piles of debris littering the path that curved up the dunes toward dozens of wooden buildings in various stages of dilapidation. Martin could see mountains of rusting animal cages of all shapes and sizes, rotting timber, scores of broken crates. He glanced at the sky, measuring the height of the sun. “I’ll explore the town,” he told the girl. “If all goes well, I’ll be back here by mid afternoon.”

“I am not able to remain past the setting of the sun,” Almagul informed him. “My father had an iron rule never to spend the night on the island. In the light of day is possible to see rodents, maybe even fleas. After it turns dark …”

Heading down the Amu Darya at half throttle the night before so as not to anger the men fishing from its banks with spotlights and grenades, Almagul had explained about the dangers awaiting visitors to Vozrozhdeniye. Fearing that American inspection teams monitoring the 1972 treaty banning biological weapons would turn up on the island, the Soviets, in 1988, had hidden tens of tons of bacterial agents in hastily dug pits. They had also buried in shallow ditches thousands of cadavers of monkeys, horses, guinea pigs, rabbits, rats and mice that had been used to test the lethality of the bacterial agents. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early ’90s, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan took custody of the island, but never bothered to dig up the buried spores or the cadavers, which had infected the island’s rodent population. The rodents tended to survive the anthrax, glanders, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, botulinum toxin or Venezuelan equine encephalitis, but eventually transmitted the sicknesses to fleas which, in turn, transmitted them to other rodents. Which meant that a simple flea bite on the island could be fatal to a human. The risks were very real. In the two years since the death of her father, Almagul knew of fourteen men from Nukus who had disappeared while scavenging on Vozrozhdeniye Island; local authorities around the rim of the receding Aral Sea presumed the missing men had been bitten by fleas and had died of plague or another sickness on the island’s dunes, and their bones picked clean by the flamingoes.

Almagul had dropped hints that bio agents or viruses spread by fleas weren’t the only things to be found in the ghost town on the island. When Martin drew her out, she said that a handful of scavengers, commanded by a warlord, had installed themselves in the ruins of Kantubek. Did the warlord have a name? Martin asked. My father, who read the bible each night before going to sleep, called the warlord Azazel after the evil spirit in the wilderness to whom a scape-goat is sent on the day of Atonement, the girl replied. Others in Nukus say he is a Danish prince with the name of Hamlet Achba. This Hamlet and his gang demand twenty-five percent of the value of what anyone carries off from the island. Almagul was betting that the warlord wouldn’t bother a visiting journalist who wanted to write about the once secret Soviet bioweapons testing range for a Canadian magazine, or the girl who took him there and back to earn enough to see her through the winter.

Favoring his game leg, Martin started up the track that snaked through the dunes. At the top he turned to wave at Almagul, but she had hiked herself onto a crate to watch the flamingoes, with their distinctive bent bills, returning to the beach and didn’t notice him. Topping a rise, he headed toward the ghost town along the main road, which consisted of slabs of concrete set end to end. In a field at the edge of town he spotted a basketball court that had been converted into a helicopter landing pad—a great white circle had been whitewashed onto the cement and its surface blackened by engine exhaust. Farther down the street he passed a vast hangar that had once housed Kantubek’s motor pool. Most of the sections of corrugated roofing had been carted off but the vehicles, buried in drifts of sand, remained—gutted green trucks, two treadless T-52 tanks, two armored personnel carriers sitting on their axles, a faded orange bus that had been driven up onto a cement ramp to be serviced and never driven off, a once-red fire engine with the hood open and the entire motor missing, the rusting hulks of half a dozen ancient tractors with faded Soviet slogans painted on their sides. Continuing on into the town, Martin came upon an enormous building with a ragged Soviet hammer and sickle flag still flapping from the pole jutting over the tarnished double doors that led to an ornate lobby. A giant mosaic depicting the weight of the state, in the form of formations of tanks and squadrons of planes and fleets of ships, filled the entire windowless wall at the side of the lobby. Signs with the Cyrillic lettering bleached out by the sun hung off lampposts. Dust and sand stirred by gusts of wind swirled around Martin’s feet at the intersections.

And then his street sense kicked in—he felt the eyes burning into the back of his neck before he caught sight of the scavengers edging into view from behind buildings around the intersection. There were five of them, all wearing canvas laced leggings and canvas gloves that stretched to the elbows and glass face masks that Uzbek cotton farmers used when their crops were being dusted. Each of the men wore a curved Cossack saber from his belt and cradled a vintage bolt-action rifle in the crook of an arm, with a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from sand and moisture. Martin’s fingers instinctively slipped behind his back to where his automatic would have been if he’d been armed with one.

One of the scavengers motioned for Martin to raise his hands over his head. Another came over and frisked him for weapons. Martin’s hands were secured in front of him at the wrists with a dog’s leash and he was pulled around a corner and down a side street. When he stumbled, a rifle butt jabbed him sharply between the shoulder blades. Two blocks farther along a door was pushed open and Martin was prodded into a building and across a lobby with only a handful of its white marble tiles still in place. He and the others splashed across a shallow trough filled with a liquid that smelled of disinfectant, then walked under a shower head that sprayed him and the guards with a fine mist of disinfectant. He could hear the voices of other scavengers, speaking in a strange language he couldn’t identify, exchanging remarks with the five who had brought him in. Double doors were jerked open and Martin found himself in an auditorium with most of the folding seats unbolted and stacked against one wall. Eight men wearing white laboratory coats and latex gloves were sitting on the few seats still intact. Slouched in a high-backed throne-like wooden chair set in the middle of the stage, with a painted backdrop from an old socialist realist operetta behind him, the warlord presided over the assemblage. He was a dwarf of a man, so short that his feet didn’t reach the ground, and dressed in a rough gray sleeveless scapular that plunged to the tops of spit-shined paratrooper boots resting on an upturned ammunition box. His bare arms were as muscular as a weight lifter’s. He wore a shoulder holster over the scapular, with the steel grip of a large navy revolver jutting from it. The old-fashioned motorcycle goggles covering his eyes gave him the appearance of an insect. A stiff czarist-era admiral’s hat sat atop his oversized head. He talked for several minutes in a low growl with one of the men in jumpsuits standing behind him before raising his head to look directly at Martin. Lifting one stubby arm, he gestured for him to approach and, his voice pitched girlishly high, barked something in the strange language of the scavengers.

At a loss for a response, Martin mumbled “Uh-huh.”

From the back of the auditorium, a girl’s voice translated. “He insists to know for what reason you come to Kantubek.”

Martin stole a glance behind him. Almagul was standing inside the auditorium door, an armed scavenger on either side of her. She smiled nervously at him as he turned back to the warlord and saluted him. “Explain to him,” he called over his shoulder, “that I am a journalist from Canada.” He produced a laminated ID card identifying him as a wire service reporter and waved it in the air. “I am writing an article on the philanthropist Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who is said to have come to Vozrozhdeniye Island when he left Prague.”

When Almagul translated Martin’s reply, the warlord bared his teeth in disbelief. He snarled something in a high-pitched voice to the men standing behind the throne, causing them to titter. The warlord kicked over the ammunition box so that his feet danced in the air as he raged at the girl standing in the back of the auditorium. When he ran out of breath he slouched back into the throne. Almagul came up behind Martin. “He tells you,” she said in a low, frightened voice, “that Samat Ugor-Zhilov is the governor of this island and the director of Kantubek’s experimental weapons programs.”

The muffled voices talking to each other in an unintelligible language had worked their way into the texture of Martin’s dream; he decided he was Lincoln Dittmann at Triple Border, listening to the Saudi he’d later identified as Osama bin Laden conferring with the Egyptian Daoud. When he finally realized that the men weren’t speaking in Arabic, he forced himself through the membrane that separated sleep from wakefulness and sat up. It took a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim light cast by feeble bulbs burning in sockets on the stone walls of the vaulted basement. He reached out and touched the cold bars and remembered that the guards had forced him into a low cage, the kind used to house monkeys in laboratories. He could make out Almagul curled up on a pile of rags in the cage next to his. Beyond her cage were other cages—more than he could count. Eight of them contained prisoners sleeping on the floor or sitting with their backs to the bars, dozing with their bearded chins on their chests.

Near the stone staircase, three men in white lab coats stood around a high stainless-steel table talking among themselves. Martin could hear their voices. Gradually a migraine mushroomed behind his eyes and he felt himself being sucked into another identity—one in which the language the men were speaking seemed vaguely familiar; to his astonishment he discovered that he understood fragments.

very stable, even in sunlight.

the advantage of anthrax over plague. Sunlight renders plague stock harmless.

… should concentrate on anthrax.

… I agree … especially pulmonary anthrax, which is extremely lethal.

… Q fever persists for months in sand.

… What are you suggesting? … bombard New York with sand and then attack America with Q fever?

… still think we are making a mistake focusing on bacterial agents, which are, in general, difficult to stabilize, difficult to weaponize.

Of course! The men were speaking Russian, a language Martin had studied in college in what seemed like a previous incarnation. He remembered the shrink at the Company clinic telling him of a case where one alter personality was able to speak a language that the other personalities didn’t understand. It was a perfect example, she’d said, of how compartmented legends can be in the brain.

not going to make the case for nerve agents over bacterial agents again, are you? Samat himself decided the question months ago.

… Samat said we could revisit the issue at any point in our program. Nerve agentsVX in particular, but Soman and Sarin alsocan be deadly.

… they have serious manufacturing problems.

… I want to remind you that tabun is relatively easy to manufacture.

… Tabun is only moderately stable.

… we are turning in circles … try one of the hemorrhagic feversthe Ebola, for instanceon one of our clients.

Ebola is taking us down a dead-end street. I grant you it is lethal but it is also relatively unstable, which makes an ebola program problematic.

… still, we have the spores Konstantin developed in his laboratory, so we might as well test them on one of the guinea pigs.

… only eight guinea pigs left.

… not to worry … two new ones.

The three scientists, if that’s what they were, fitted on Russian army gas masks equipped with enormous charcoal filters. One of them selected a test tube from a cluster in a refrigerator and, removing the wax seal with a pocket knife, carefully poured a single drop of yellowish liquid onto a wad of cotton in a petri dish and quickly covered it with a glass lid. The scientists pulled a low table up to the cage at the far end of the basement and positioned a small ventilator so that it would blow over the petri dish into the cage. The bearded giant of a man sitting with his back to the bars in the cage rocked forward onto his knees and began to shout at the men in the language of the scavengers. His ranting woke the other prisoners. Almagul climbed onto her knees and, grasping the bars, yelled at the men in lab coats in Uzbek. The prisoner in the cage next to hers began raging at them, too. Almagul looked at Martin, her face contorted with terror. “They are experimenting on one of the scavengers,” she cried, pointing toward the men in white lab coats.

In the last cage, the bearded man sank back onto his haunches and, covering his mouth with the tail of his shirt, breathed through the fabric. One of the scientists brought over a Sony camera attached to a tripod and began filming the prisoner. Another scientist checked the time on his wristwatch, noted it on his clipboard, then removed the cover on the petri dish and stepped away from the cage.

Martin’s thoughts went back to the trial that had landed him and the girl in the monkey cages. The court martial—the warlord’s term for the proceedings—had started after the lunch break and lasted twenty minutes. Presiding from the makeshift throne on the stage of the auditorium, Hamlet had acted as prosecutor and judge. Martin, his wrists secured with the dogs leash, had been charged with both high and low treason. Almagul, accused of aiding and abetting, had stood behind Martin, nervously whispering translations in his ear. Hamlet had opened the proceedings by announcing that he was absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused; that the sole purpose of the court martial was to determine the degree of guilt and, eventually, the appropriate punishment.

“Guilty of what?” Martin had asked after pleading innocent to the formal charge of high and low treason.

“Guilty of working for a foreign intelligence agency,” Hamlet had shot back. “Guilty of trying to steal Russia’s biowarfare secrets.”

“My only interest,” Martin had had Almagul say, “is to interview Samat Ugor-Zhilov.” And he had explained about Samat’s humanitarian quest—repatriating to a village in Lithuania the bones of Saint Gedymin in order to obtain the sacred Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel.

“And where,” Hamlet inquired, leaning forward, cocking his big head so as to better catch Martin’s response, “would Samat find the bones of Saint Gedymin?”

“I was told he’d traced them to a small Orthodox church near the city of Córdoba in Argentina.”

“And what,” the warlord continued, his short feet dancing on the ammunition box, “would Samat offer the Argentines in return for the bones of the saint?”

Martin realized he’d reached the mine field. “I have no idea,” he replied. “That’s one of the questions I wanted to ask Samat.”

At which point Hamlet launched into a tirade so fierce that Almagul had all she could do to keep up with him. “He says you know very well what Samat would trade, otherwise you would not have come to this island. He says the Russian nuclear arsenal will become obsolete in ten years time and the Americans will rule Russia unless Samat is able to perfect bioweapons to counter the American threat. He says bioweapons are the only cost efficient answer to Russia’s problem. He says it costs $2 million to kill half the population of one square kilometer with missiles loaded with conventional warheads, $80,000 with a nuclear weapon, $600 with a chemical weapon and $1 with a bioweapon. Vozrozhdeniye Island, he reminds you, was once the center of bioweapon research for the Soviet Union: Under Samat’s direction, and with Samat’s financial backing, Vozrozhdeniye is once again developing a bioarsenal that will save Russia from American domination.”

Hamlet collapsed back into the throne. One of the white coated scientists brought over a porcelain basin filled with water smelling of disinfectant and the warlord rang out the sponge in it and mopped his feverish brow.

Martin said, very quietly, “Are you suggesting that Samat gave bioweapon seed stock to the Argentineans in exchange for the bones of the saint?”

“That is not what I am suggesting,” the warlord groaned when he heard Alamgul’s translation. “Is that what I am suggesting?” he asked the scientists in lab coats.

“Nyet, nyet,” they responded in a discordant chorus.

“There is the proof,” Hamlet cried, waving toward the scientists as if they were his star witnesses.

“Then what are you suggesting?” Martin had Almagul ask.

“Who is on trial here, you or me?” the warlord retorted furiously. “I am not suggesting Samat provided the Argentinean military with bioweapons. I am also not suggesting that he provided them with the orbits of American spy satellites. That rumor is without substance. It is a fact of life, as any idiot knows, that to get high-quality photographs, the spy satellites are obliged to orbit earth at low altitudes, circling the planet in a polar orbit every ninety minutes. It is a fact of life that they are over any one point on the earth’s surface for only a few minutes. If you know when one of the satellites is due overhead, you can suspend operations you do not want the Americans to photograph. India and Pakistan have been doing this for years. So has Iraq. From whence comes the rumor that it is from Saddam Hussein in Iraq that Samat obtained the American satellite orbits that he traded to the Argentines for the bones of the saint.”

It dawned on Martin that Hamlet and the people around him were stark raving mad; characters that Alice might have come across when she fell down the rabbit hole. He decided it was in his interest to humor the mad warlord. “And what in the world could Samat have given to Saddam Hussein in return for the orbits?”

Almagul whispered, “It is perilous to know the answer,” but Martin, drunk on state secrets, ordered her to translate the question.

Hamlet drew his navy revolver from its holster and spun the chamber, sending the ticking sound reverberating through the auditorium. Then he raised the revolver and sighted on Martin’s head and said “Bang, bang, you are extinguished.” He laughed at his little joke and the others in the auditorium laughed with him, albeit somewhat anxiously, so it seemed to Martin. After a moment Hamlet said, “If Samat had wanted to go down that path, he could have traded to Saddam Hussein anthrax spores and hemorrhagic seed viruses that were harvested here on the island in exchange for the orbits.” The warlord lifted the goggles off of his eyes and scratched thoughtfully at the side of his bulbous nose with the barrel of the revolver. A stunted grin materialized on his thick lips. “He could have traded the orbits for the bones of the saint. And the bones of the saint for the Torah scrolls. But it goes without saying, none of this actually happened.”

Hamlet, tiring of the game, gaveled the butt of his revolver down on the arm of the throne. “You and the girl are guilty as charged and sentenced to the monkey cages, to be used as guinea pigs in our experiments. Case closed. Trial over. Court adjourned.”

The groaning of the giant scavenger in the last cage shook Martin out of his reverie. Almagul, sitting on the icy floor with her back to the bars in the cage next to Martin, buried her head between her knees. Her body shook with silent sobs. Martin reached through the bars to touch her shoulder. “I recognize the men in the cages,” the girl whispered hoarsely. “They are the ones missing from Nukus. We are all surely going to die like my father and my sister,” she added. “They have already killed six scavengers from Nukus and thrown their bones to the flamingoes. The worst part is that I have no sister to take my name.”

In the last cage the giant scavenger pitched forward onto his knees, with his head touching the ground, and then rolled onto his side. The scientist filming the test called to the two others in Russian to come over and look. The man with the clipboard produced a large skeleton key and opened the padlock on the monkey cage and the three Russians in lab coats, still wearing their gas masks, ducked inside and crouched around the body. One of them raised the scavenger’s limp wrist and let it flop back again. “Konstantin will be extremely pleased with his ebola—” he started to say when the giant scavenger, bellowing with a primitive furor, sprang to life and began shattering the gas masks and the facial bones of the scientists with his fists. With blood seeping from under their gas masks, two of the scientists crawled on all fours toward the low door of the cage, but the giant caught them by their ankles and hauled them back and, climbing over their bodies, pounded their faces into the cement floor. In the other cages the prisoners called to the giant scavenger to free them, but he kept lifting the heads by the hair and smashing them into the cement. It was Almagul’s voice that finally penetrated to the wild man’s brain. Gasping for air, a maniacal gleam in his bulging eyes, the scavenger released his grip on the bloody heads and looked up.

Almagul called his name and spoke soothingly to him in the strange language of the scavengers. The giant, his arms and shirt drenched in blood, crawled through the door of his cage and staggered to his feet. The other prisoners were all talking to him at once. Almagul spoke quietly to the giant. Martin noticed that mucus was seeping from his nostrils as he lurched across the basement to the stainless steel table, snapped off one of the legs and came back to the cages. One by one he slipped the narrow end of the steel leg through the padlocks and, using the bars for leverage, snapped open the locks. Martin was the last to emerge from the cages. The giant collapsed at his feet—Martin, reaching to help him, found he was burning with fever. “There is nothing we can do for him,” Almagul said. The other scavengers backed away from the fallen man until Almagul snapped angrily at them. One of them came forward and brought the stainless steel table leg down on the giant’s head to put him out of his misery. Then, armed with steel legs from the table and the wooden legs broken off chairs, the scavengers made their way up the stone steps. Almagul, leading the way, carefully opened the steel door leading to the biowarfare laboratory and stepped aside to let the others through. Two Russian scientists napping on cots were strangled to death by the desperate prisoners. Three other scientists were working with frozen anthrax spores in a walk-in refrigerator. Martin thrust one of the stainless steel legs through the door handles, locking the Russians inside, and then turned up the thermostat. The three scientists, realizing they were trapped, began pounding on the thick glass window in the door. One of the prisoners found a plastic jerry can in a closet filled with kerosene for the heating unit. He splashed kerosene over the shelves filled with petri dishes and filing cabinets. Almagul struck a match and tossed it into the spilled kerosene. A bluish fire skidded across the floor. In a moment the laboratory was awash in flames.

The escaping scavengers stumbled across two guards playing backgammon in an ante chamber with razor-stropped one-edged Cossack sabers stacked in four old umbrella stands. Both of the guards lunged for their rifles but were clubbed to death before they could reach them. Snatching the two rifles, stuffing their pockets with bullets, Martin and Almagul led the scavengers, armed now with sabers, up a back staircase that led to the lobby. The single guard on duty there backed against a wall and raised his hands in surrender when he saw the scavengers; one of them walked up to him and split his skull open with a single stroke of his sword. On a gesture from Martin, the men spread out and burst through the several double doors into the auditorium. The fight was short and lethal. Furiously working the bolt of his rifle, hardly bothering to take aim, Martin—a pulse pounding in his temple, his trigger finger trembling—provided covering fire from the back of the auditorium as the escaping prisoners, brandishing the sabers over their heads and screaming savagely, charged down the aisles. The warlord, who had been holding court from the throne, cowered behind it as his guards, caught by surprise, desperately tried to fight off the attackers. Two of the prisoners were killed before they reached the stage; a third was shot in the face as he climbed onto it. When Martin’s bolt-action rifle jammed, he caught Lincoln’s voice roaring in his ear: Grab it by the barrel, for Christsake, use it as a club. Gripping the hot barrel with both hands, Martin joined the battle on the stage, clubbing wildly at the guards as they tried to fend off the blows with their rifles or their arms. When one of the guards stumbled, Martin pounced on him and pinned him down while a prisoner hacked off the guard’s hand holding the rifle. Breathing heavily, Martin stood up as another prisoner planted one foot on the neck of the fallen man and slit open his back, exposing his spine down to the coccyx. Gradually the prisoners, pushed by a ferocity that came from having nothing to lose and their lives to win, overpowered the guards who were still alive. The wounded guards, with blood gushing from ugly gashes, and the three who surrendered were hauled into the orchestra pit and decapitated with saber strokes to the napes of their necks. One headless man took several short steps before collapsing to the floor. Martin, sick to his stomach, watched the scavengers circle around the throne almost as if they were playing a harmless child’s game. Hamlet had pulled the square of thick theater curtain that had been used as a carpet over his head. The scavengers tore it away from his clutching hands and prodded the warlord to his feet with the points of their sabers. Wiping snot from his nose, Hamlet begged for mercy as the prisoners stripped away his canvas leggings and boots and gloves and goggles and marched him through the auditorium and lobby and out into the street.

Picking his way barefoot through the gutter to avoid the fleas, Hamlet kept babbling in the strange language of the scavengers, but nobody paid the slightest attention to what he was saying. As the sun edged above the horizon, the group retraced the route Martin had taken into Kantubek, passing the ornate building with the mosaic in the lobby depicting the weight of the state. When they reached the motor pool hangar, aswirl in sand and dust, the scavengers found a roll of electric wire and lashed the warlord of Vozrozhdeniye Island to one of the gutted green trucks, his wrists bound over his head to the rusted frame of a window, his bare feet just reaching the drift of sand when he stood on his toes. The warlord whimpered something and Almagul, watching from the street, called out a translation for Martin.

“He pleads with them not to leave him here where the rodents and fleas can get to him. He appeals to be shot.”

“Ask him where Samat went when he left here,” Martin shouted.

“I do not understand his answer,” Almagul called back. “He says something about the bones of a saint being returned to a church in Lithuania.”

“Ask him if the church is in the village of Zuzovka near the frontier with Belarus.”

“I think he has become mad. He tells only that Samat is a saint—he says this over and over.”

Hamlet Achba could be heard ranting incoherently as the four surviving prisoners and Martin and Almagul made their way along the track that ran through the dunes to the beached boat. At one point Martin stopped to look back at Hamlet. He was about to start up the dunes toward the warlord when he heard Dante’s wild Irish cackle in his ear. Don’t you know the bible instructs victims how to survive emotionally? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning, laddie. When Martin hesitated, Dante sighed in despair. Aye, you’re a weak-kneed excuse for a man. Martin had to agree. Nodding grimly, he turned and stumbled down the hill to join the others on the beach. The men rinsed the blood off their bodies in the sea and tugged the boat off the sand and climbed aboard. Almagul started the outboard, sending the white flamingoes scattering into the air. She backed the boat until the water was deep enough to swing it around and head at full throttle toward the mainland. While Almagul distributed watermelon and goat cheese from the hamper, Martin gazed back at the ghost town of Kantubek, growing smaller and smaller until it finally vanished into the tulle-like haze that thickened as the sun stepped higher in the east.

The solemn timeserver behind the counter at the central post office in Nukus had never before placed a call out of the country and needed to read the appropriate chapter in a manual before she could figure out the various codes and how to charge for the communication. On the third attempt she finally got through to a place she had never heard of—the borough of Brooklyn—and punched the chess timer that she used to measure the duration of calls.

“Stella, that you?” Martin called into the phone in the open booth while the half dozen people queuing for pension checks looked on in wonderment at someone dispatching his voice across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America and receiving an answer within a fraction of a second.

“Did you catch up with Samat?”

“I missed him but it couldn’t have been by much. The basketball court was blackened by exhaust.”

“You okay, Martin?”

“I am now. It was touch and go for a while.”

“What does a basketball court have to do with Samat?”

“It had a white circle painted on it, which means it’d been turned into a helicopter pad. Unlike me, Samat travels first class. I come chugging after him in open boats with outboard motors. How you making out with your new front tooth?”

“I decided you were right about the old chipped tooth—it had a certain charm even if it did make me look breakable. I don’t recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.”

“You can always chip the new tooth.”

“Very funny. Martin, don’t get angry but you are tracking down Samat, aren’t you?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. The fact is I hardly know you—I don’t think you’re a serial killer or anything like that, but you could be a serial liar. You could be phoning me from Hoboken and making the rest up.”

“I’m phoning you from a post office in Uzbekistan. The woman who put the call through had never called out of the country before.”

“I want to believe you. I really do. But the people you used to work for—you know whom I mean—sent a lady psychiatrist around yesterday. Her name was Bernice Treffler. She said she’d treated you after you were laid off.”

“What else did she say?”

“She said—oh, Martin …”

“Spit it out.”

“She said you were off your rocker. Are you? Off your rocker, Martin?”

“Yes and no.”

Stella exploded. “What kind of an answer is that, for God’s sake? Either you are or you aren’t. There’s no middle ground.”

“It’s more complicated than you think. There is a middle ground. I’m not insane, but there are things I can’t remember.”

“What kind of things?”

The timeserver watching the chess clock muttered something to Almagul, who came over to tug at Martin’s sleeve. “She says this is going to cost you the wages of a year.”

Martin waved the girl away. “Somewhere along the way,” he told Stella, “I lost track of which of the several skins I lived in was the real me.”

He could hear Stella groan into the phone. “Oh, God, I should have known it was too good to be true.”

“Stella, listen. What I have wrong with me isn’t fatal, either for me or for us.”

“Us?”

Us is what we’re both worried about, isn’t it?”

“Wow! I admit there are moments when you sound as if you could be off your rocker. Then there are other moments when you sound perfectly sane to me.”

“I am imperfectly sane.”

Stella started laughing. “I can live with imperfection—”

Suddenly the line went dead in Martin’s ear. “Stella? Stella, are you still there?” He called to Almagul, “Tell her the line’s been cut.”

When Almagul translated, the time server reached out and punched the chess clock with her fist and began calculating the cost of the call on an abacus. When she had figured out the sum, she wrote it on a scrap of paper and held it up so everyone in the post office could tell their children about the deranged foreigner who had spent a fortune to dispatch his voice to a place on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean with the unlikely name of Brooklyn.

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