Legends

1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS THE GET

DRIVING IN THE VINTAGE PACKARD HE HAD BORROWED FROM HIS friend and landlord, Tsou Xing, the owner of the Mandarin restaurant below the pool parlor on Albany Avenue, Martin and Stella reached Belfast after dark. The pimply boy working the pump at the gas station on the edge of town ticked off on grimy fingers the choices available to them: a bunch of descent hotels in town, some pricier than others; an assortment of motels along Route 19 either side of town, some seedier than others; several bed and breakfasts, best one by a country mile was old Mrs. Sayles place on a groundswell overseeing the Genesee, the advantage being the riot of river water which lulled some folks to sleep, the disadvantage being the riot of river water which kept some folks up until all hours.

They found their way to the house on the river with “B & B” and “Lelia Sayles” etched on a shingle hanging from a branch of an ancient oak, and reached through the tear in the screen to work the knocker on the front door. As they didn’t have luggage, Martin was obliged to cough up $30 in advance for a room with a matrimonial bed, bathroom down the hall, kindly go barefoot if you use the facilities during the night so as not to wake the ghosts sleeping in the attic. They went out to get a bite to eat at a diner across from the public library on South Main and lingered over the decaf, both of them trying to put off the moment when there would be no turning back. Parking on the gravel in Mrs. Sayles’s driveway afterward, Martin decided the Packard’s engine oil level needed checking. “I’m every bit as agitated as you,” Stella murmured, reading his mind as he propped up the hood. She started toward the house, then wheeled back when she reached the porch, her left palm drifting up to the triangle of pale skin visible on her chest. “Look at it this way, Martin,” she called. “If the sex doesn’t work out to everyone’s expectations, we can always fall back on the erotic phone relationship.”

“I want sex and the erotic phone relationship,” he replied.

Stella angled her head to one side. “Well, then,” she said, laughter replacing the nervousness in her eyes, “maybe you ought to stop monkeying with the damn motor. I mean, it’s not as if either of us were virgins.”

“How’d it go?” Mrs. Sayles asked the next morning as she set out dishes of homemade confitures on the kitchen table.

Martin, irritated, demanded, “How’d what go?”

“It,” Mrs. Sayles insisted. “Heavens to Betsy, the carnal knowledge part. I may be pushing eighty from the far side, but I’m sure as hell not brain dead.”

“It went very nicely, thank you,” Stella said evenly.

“Loosen up, young fellow,” Mrs. Sayles advised when she noticed Martin buttering a piece of toast for the second time. “You’ll be a better bed partner for it.”

Hoping to change the subject, Martin produced the picture postcard.

“My great-great-great-grandfather, name of Dave Sanford, built the first sawmill on the banks of the Genesee River,” Mrs. Sayles explained, all the while rummaging through a knitted tote bag for her reading glasses. “That was long about 1809. This house was built in 1829 with lumber from that mill. Belfast was a one-horse town in those days. Nothing but forests far as the eye could see, so they say, so they say. When the lumber boom wore out the forests, most folks turned to raising cattle. The White Creek Cheese Factory, which is famous ‘round here, was founded long about 1872 by my great-grandfather—”

Stella tried to steer the conversation back to the Amish. “What about the picture on the postcard?”

“It’s going to stay a blur until I come up with my reading spectacles, dear child. Could have sworn I put them in here. Never could figure out how a body can find her reading spectacles if she’s not wearing them. Well, I’ll be, here they are, all the while.” Mrs. Sayles fitted them on and, accepting the postcard from Stella, held it up to the sunlight streaming through a bay window. “Like I was saying, I know the Amish crowd up on White Creek Road pretty good because of my family’s connection with the White Creek Cheese Factory. Hmmmm.” Mrs. Sayles pursed her lips. “Truth to tell, I don’t reckon I recognize any of the Amish on this here picture postcard.”

“How about the houses and the barn?” Martin said, coming up behind her, pointing to the two clapboard houses built very close to each other, to the barn with a mansard roof on a rise across from them.

“Houses, barn neither. Mind you, there are an abundance of Amish living on the small roads sloping off White Creek. Picture could have been taken on any one of them.” Mrs. Sayles had an inspiration. “There’s a fellow, name of Elkanah Macy, works as a janitor over at the Valleyview Amish school on Ramsey Road. He moonlights as a handyman for the Amish out in the White Creek area. If anybody can help you, he can. Be sure to tell Elkanah it was me sent you around.”

Elkanah Macy turned out to be a retired navy petty officer who, judging from the framed photographs lining one wall, had served on half the warships in the U.S. Navy during his twenty years in the service. He had converted the atelier in the Amish school basement into a replica of a ship’s machine shop, replete with calendar pinups of naked females. “Lelia sent you around, you say?” Macy remarked, sucking on a soggy hand-rolled cigarette as he sized up his visitors through hooded eyes. “Bet she went an’ told you the goddamn whopper ‘bout Dave Sanford being her great-great-great-grand-daddy. Hell, she tells that to anyone stands still long enough to hear her out. Listen to her tell it, anybody who did anything in Belfast was her kin—Sanford’s sawmill on the Genesee, the old cheese factory out on White Creek Road. Bet she went an’ told you ‘bout the goddamn ghosts in the attic. Ha! Take it from somebody that knows, lady’s got herself a sprightly imagination. Fact is, the first Sayles in Allegheny County were loansharks that went and bought up farmhouses cheap during the forties and sold them for a handsome profit to the GIs coming back from the war. What is it you want with the Amish over at White Creek?”

Martin showed Mr. Macy the picture postcard. “You wouldn’t by any chance know where we could find these houses, would you?”

“Might. Might not. Depends.”

“On what?” Stella asked.

“On how much you be willing to pay for the information.”

“You don’t beat around the bush,” Stella observed.

“Heck, not beating around the damn bush saves time and shoe leather.”

Martin peeled off a fifty from a wad of bills. “What would half a hundred buy us?”

Macy snatched the bill out of Martin’s fingers. “The two farm houses with the barn directly across from them are about three, three and a half miles out on McGuffin Ridge Road. Head out of Belfast on South Main and you’ll wind up on 19. Look for the Virgin Mary billboard with her one-eight-hundred number. Right after, you’ll cross 305 going west, bout a half mile farther on you’ll hit White Creek Road going south toward Friendship. For some of the way White Creek Road runs parallel to the factual creek. Long ‘bout halfway to Friendship, McGuffin Ridge Road runs off of White Creek. You got to be stone blind to miss it.”

Martin held up another fifty dollar bill. “We’re actually looking for an old pal of mine who we think moved into one of the farm houses in that area.”

“Your old pal Amish?”

“No.”

“Not complicated.” Macy snatched the second bill. “All them Amish get me over to unplug the damn electric meters and fuse boxes when they move in. Amish don’t take to electricity or the things that work off it—ice boxes, TVs, Singers, irons, you name it. You can tell an Amish lives in a house if the electric counter is hanging off the side of it, unplugged. You can tell someone who ain’t Amish lives there if’n the goddamn counter’s still attached.”

“Are there a lot of non Amish living out on McGuffin Ridge Road?” asked Martin.

When the janitor scratched at his unshaven chin in puzzlement, Martin came up with still another fifty dollar bill.

“A-mazing how a picture of U.S. Grant can stir up recollections,” Macy said, folding the fifty and adding it to the other two in his shirt pocket. “Except for one house, McGuffin Ridge is all Amish. The one house is the second one on your picture postcard.”

Stella turned to Martin. “Which explains why Samat sent this particular postcard to his mother.”

“It does,” Martin agreed. He nodded at Macy. “That’s quite a fleet,” he remarked, glancing at the framed photographs on the wall. “You served on all those warships?”

“Never been to actual sea in my life,” Macy said with a giggle. “Only served on them while they was in drydock, reason being I get seasick the minute a ship puts to sea.”

“You certainly picked the wrong service,” Stella said.

Macy shook his head emphatically. “Loved the goddamn navy,” he said. “Loved the ships. Didn’t much like what they was floating on, which was the sea. Hell, I’d re-up if they’d take me. Yes, I would.”

Martin pulled the Packard into the gas station at the edge of town and bought a bottle of spring water and an Allegheny County map while Stella used the restroom. Heading out of town on 19, he felt her hand come to rest on his thigh. His body tensed—real intimacy, the kind that comes after sex, was a strange bedfellow to Martin Odum. In his mind’s eye, he thought of himself as being somewhere between Dante Pippen, who made love and war with the same frenetic energy, and Lincoln Dittmann, who had once gone off to Rome to try and find a whore he’d come across in Triple Border. Stella sensed the tenseness under her fingers. “I wasn’t lying to Mrs. Sayles,” she remarked. “It did go very nicely, thank you. All things considered, last night was a great start to our sex life.”

Martin cleared his throat. “I am not comfortable talking about things like our sex life.”

“Not asking you to talk about it,” Stella shot back, laughter in her voice. “Expecting you to listen to me talk about it. Expecting you to mumble uh-huh once in a while in quiet encouragement.”

Martin glanced at her and said, “Uh-huh.”

The Packard sped past the billboard advertising the one-eight-hundred number of the Virgin Mary. Half a mile beyond 305 they reached the junction with the signpost reading “White Creek Road” and “Friendship.” Martin turned onto White Creek and slowed down. When the highway dipped, he lost sight of the creek off to the right, only to spot it again when they topped a rise. In places the rippling water of White Creek reminded him of the Lesnia, which ran parallel to the spur that connected Prigorodnaia to the Moscow-Petersburg highway. The farmhouses along White Creek were set on the edge of the road to make it easier to get firewood and fodder in during the winter months when the ground was knee-deep in snow. The houses, spaced a quarter or a half mile apart, some of them with carpentry or broadloom workshops behind them and samples of what was being produced set out on raised platforms or porches, all had the electric meters and fuse boxes dangling off the clapboard walls. Amish going-to-market buggies could be seen in the garages, with cart mares grazing in adjoining fields. Occasionally children, dressed like little adults in their black suits or ankle-length dresses and bonnets and lace-up high shoes, would scamper out to the side of the road to stare shyly at the passing automobile.

The McGuffin Ridge turnoff loomed ahead and Martin swung off White Creek. McGuffin was a mirror image of White Creek—the road crossed rolling farm country, with farm houses built close to the road, all of them with electric meters and lengths of black cable hanging off the walls. Three and a half miles into McGuffin Ridge, Stella tightened her grip on Martin’s thigh.

“I see them,” he told her.

The Packard, moving even more slowly, came abreast of the two identical clapboard farm houses built very close to each other. Across the road, a weathered barn stood atop a small rise. A crude American eagle crafted out of metal jutted from the ornate weather vane atop the mansard roof. Two Amish men in bibbed dungarees were sawing planks behind the first of the two houses. An Amish woman sat on a rocker on the porch crocheting a patch quilt that spilled off near her feet. As the Packard passed the second house, Stella looked back and caught her breath.

“The electric meter is still attached to the house,” she said.

“It’s a perfect setup for somebody who wants to melt into the landscape,” Martin said. “He can get the Amish women next door to cook for him. If anybody comes nosing around when he’s out, the Amish men will tell him. You didn’t notice an automobile anywhere around the house?”

“No. Maybe he goes to town by buggy, like the Amish.”

“Not likely. No car, no Samat.”

“What do we do now?” Stella asked as Martin drove on down the road.

“We wait until Samat comes back. Then we’ll dust off your father’s antique Tula-Tokarev and go calling on him.”

Martin pulled the Packard off the road beyond the next rise and he and Stella walked back to a stand of maple on a butt of land. On the far side of the stand, it was possible to see the two houses and the barn across the road from them. Sitting on the ground facing each other with their backs against trees, they settled down to wait. Martin pulled Dante’s lucky white silk scarf from a pocket and knotted it around his neck.

“Where’d you get that?” Stella asked.

“Girl gave it to someone I know in Beirut. She said it would save his life if he wore it.”

“Did it?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“She lost her life.”

Stella let that sink in. After awhile she said out of the blue, “Kastner was murdered, wasn’t he?”

Martin avoided her eye. “What makes you think that?”

“The FBI man, Felix Kiick, told me.”

“In so many words? He said your father didn’t die of a heart attack?”

“This Felix Kiick was a straight guy. Kastner trusted him. Me, too, I trusted him.”

“So did I,” Martin agreed.

“I thought about it a thousand times. I came at it from every possible direction.”

“Came at what?”

“His letter. The actual autopsy doesn’t mention the minuscule break in the skin near the shoulder blade. Mr. Kiick’s letter does.”

“He said it was compatible with an insect bite.”

“He was waving a red flag in front of my face, Martin. He was drawing my attention to something that was compatible with a lethal injection using a very thin needle. Kastner used to tell me about things like that—he said lethal injections were the KGB’s favorite method of assassination. In his day the KGB’s hit men favored a tasteless rat poison that thinned out the blood so much your pulse disappeared and you eventually stopped breathing. Kastner had heard they were working on more sophisticated substances that couldn’t be easily traced—he told me they had developed a clotting agent that could block a coronary artery and trigger myocardial infarction. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice Kiick’s reference to the insect bite.”

“I noticed.”

“And?”

“Kiick’s the guy who suggested your father hire me to find Samat. Kiick spent the better part of his FBI career in counterterrorism. He crossed paths with the Company’s Deputy Director of Operations, Crystal Quest—”

“The one you called Fred when you first spoke to Kastner.”

“You have a good memory for things beside KGB jokes. Kiick must have known Fred didn’t want Samat found. And now Kiick’s waving the insect bite in front of our faces.”

Stella seemed relieved. “So you don’t think I’m raving mad?”

“You’re a lot of things. Raving mad is not one of them.”

“If I didn’t know better, I might take that for a compliment.”

“Someone else was killed around the time your father was being stung by an insect. Her name was Minh.”

Stella remembered the Israeli Shabak officer telling Martin about the Chinese girl who’d been stung to death by his bees on the roof over the pool parlor. “What does one death have to do with the other?” she asked.

“If your father was murdered, it means someone was trying to close down the search for Samat. Minh was killed tending my hives, which means she was wearing my white overalls and the pith helmet with mosquito netting hanging from it when something made the bees explode out of one of the hives.”

“From a distance she would have looked like you.” Something else occurred to her. “What about those shots when we were walking from Kiryat Arba to that sacred cave—you told me two bullets from a high-powered rifle came pretty close to you.”

“Could have been Palestinians shooting at Jews,” Martin said. He didn’t sound very convincing.

“Maybe the same people who killed Kastner and your Chinese friend Minh were shooting at you.”

“Uh-huh. The Oligarkh has a long reach. But we’ll never know for sure.

“Oh, Martin, I think I’m frightened …”

“Join the world. I’m never not frightened.”

The long shadows that materialize immediately before sunset were beginning to stretch their tentacles across the fields. Martin, following his own thoughts, said, “You’ve changed the way I look at things, Stella. I used to think I wanted to spend the rest of my life boring myself to death.”

“For someone who wanted to bore himself to death, you sure gave a good imitation of living an exhilarating life.”

“Did I?”

“Kiryat Arba, London, Prague, that Soviet island in the Aral Sea, that Lithuanian town rioting over who gets to keep the bones of some obscure saint. And then there’s the whole story of Prigorodnaia and the seven-kilometer spur that leads to it. Some boring life.”

“You left out the most exhilarating part.”

“Which is?”

“You.”

Stella pushed herself away from the tree to crouch next to him and bury her face in his neck. “Fools rush in,” she murmured, “where angels fear to tread.”

The sun had vanished behind the hills to the west and a rose-gray blush had infused the sky overhead when they spotted the headlights coming down McGuffin Ridge Road from the direction of White Creek. Martin stood up and tugged Stella to her feet. The car appeared to slow as it neared the two farm houses. It swung away from them to climb the dirt ramp leading to the barn. The figure of a man could be seen pulling open the barn doors, and closing them after he’d parked the car inside. Moments later a porch light flicked on across the road in the nearest of the two houses. The man let himself into the house. Lights appeared in the ground floor windows. Martin and Stella exchanged looks.

“I don’t want you to take any risks,” Stella said flatly. “If he’s armed, the hell with my sister’s divorce, shoot him.”

Martin smiled for the first time that day. “You sure you told jokes for the KGB? You sure you weren’t one of their wetwork specialists?”

“Wetwork?”

“Hit men. Or in your case, hit women.”

“I told killer jokes, Martin. Hey, I’m more nervous now than I was last night. Let’s get this over with.”

In the gathering gloom, they made their way on foot down the white stripe in the middle of the road toward the two houses. Somewhere behind them a dog barked and a quarter of a mile farther along McGuffin Ridge other dogs began to howl. Through the porch windows of the second house, Martin could see the Amish family sitting down to supper at a long table lit by candles; everyone bowed their head as the bearded man at the head of the table recited a prayer. Martin checked the Tula-Tokarev to be sure the safety was off, then climbed silently onto the porch ahead of Stella and flattened himself against the clapboard to one side of the front door. He motioned for Stella to come up and knock.

Speaking English with a thick Russian accent, the man who lived in the house could be heard calling, “Is that you, Zaccheus? I told you to bring the meal over at eight. It is not civilized to sit down to supper at the hour you Americans eat.” The door opened and a gaunt man, his face masked by a thick beard with only his seaweed-green eyes visible, regarded Stella through the screen. The porch light was above and behind her and her face was lost in shadows.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What is it you’re doing out here this time of day?”

Stella breathed, “Priviet, Samat.”

Samat gasped. “Tyi,” he whispered. “Shto tyi zdes delaish?”

Stella gazed directly into Samat’s eyes. “It’s him,” she said.

Martin stepped into view, the antique Tula-Tokarev aimed at Samat’s solar plexus. Stella opened the screen door and Martin stepped across the sill. Samat, white spittle forming at one corner of his thin lips, backed into the room. He held his hands wide, palms up, almost in greeting. “Jozef, thanks to God, you are still among the living.” He started to pose questions in Russian. Martin realized that Jozef, like Stella and Samat, was a Russian speaker. He, Martin, could grasp words and phrases, sometimes the gist of a sentence, but an entire conversation in Russian was more than he could handle. He cut Samat off in mid sentence. “V Amerike, po-angliiski govoriat—in America, English is spoken.”

“What are you doing with her?” Samat looked from one to the other. “How is it possible you know each other?”

Stella seemed as dazed as Samat. “Don’t tell me you two know each other.”

“Our paths have crossed,” Martin told her.

Samat sank onto a couch. “How did you find me, Estelle?”

Martin pulled over a wooden chair and, setting it back to front, straddled it facing Samat, the handgun resting on the top slat in the high back and pointed at his chest. Settling onto a bar stool, Stella flipped the picture postcard at Samat’s feet. Retrieving it from the floor, he took in the photograph, then turned it over to look at the post office cancellation stamp. “Zaccheus was supposed to mail this from Rochester,” he whined. “The son of a bitch never went farther than Belfast. No wonder you found the two houses on McGuffin Ridge.” He looked intently at Martin, then at the postcard. “Jozef, you went back to Prigorodnaia. You saw my mother.”

“Why is he calling you Jozef?” demanded Stella, utterly mystified.

Martin kept his eyes locked on Samat’s. “I missed you by a day or two. The priest said you’d flown off in your helicopter after delivering the tiny cross carved from the wood of the True Cross.”

“Must you point that weapon at me?”

Stella answered for him. “He definitely must, if only to make me feel better.”

Mopping his brow with the back of a sleeve, Samat asked, “Jozef, how much do you remember?”

“All of it.” In his mind’s eye Martin could visualize the first black-and-white photograph the Russian interrogator in Moscow had shown him; an emaciated figure of a man, whom the Russian identified as Kafkor, Joseph, could be seen, stark naked with a crown of thorns on his head, wading toward shore from the row boat, the two guards in striped shirts following behind him. “I remember every detail. I remember being tortured for so long I lost count of time.”

Stella leaned forward. She was beginning to grasp why Martin considered himself to be imperfectly sane. “Who tortured you?” she asked in a whisper.

“The men in striped shirts,” Martin said. “The ex-paratroopers who guarded the dacha in Prigorodnaia, who brought me across the river …” He eyed Samat. “I remember the cigarettes being stubbed out on my body. I remember the large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard bearing the words The spy Kafkor being passed through the flesh between my shoulder blades. I remember being brought across the Lesnia with all the road workers gaping at me. I remember the guards prodding me up the incline to the crater that had been gouged into the spur of road.”

Samat started hyperventilating. When he could speak again, he said, “I beg you to believe me, Jozef, I would have saved you if it had been within the realm of possibility.”

“Instead you gave Kafkor the spy a last cigarette.”

“You do remember!”

Stella looked from one to the other; she could almost hear her father instructing her that in the life of espionage operatives, questions would always outnumber answers.

Samat started to reach into a cardigan. Martin thumbed back the hammer on the handgun. The click reverberated through the room. Samat froze. “I absolutely must smoke a cigarette,” he said weakly. He held the cardigan open and reached very slowly into an inside pocket and extracted a pack of Marlboros. Pulling one cigarette free, he struck a wooden match and brought the flame to the end of the cigarette. His hand shook and he had to grip his wrist with the other hand to steady it and hold the flame to the cigarette. Sucking it into life, he held it away from his body between his thumb and third finger and watched the smoke spiral up toward the overhead light fixture. “What else do you remember, Jozef?”

Martin could almost hear the husky voice of the Russian interrogator, who went by the legend Arkhip Cheklachvili. He repeated what Cheklachvili had told him back in Moscow; at moments his own voice and that of the interrogator overlapped in his head. “Prigorodnaia’s tractor repairman drove me to Moscow in the village’s tow truck. His intention was to take me to a hospital. At a red light on the Ring Road, not far from the American Embassy, I leaped from the cab of the truck and disappeared in the darkness.”

“Yes, yes, it all fits,” Samat blurted out. “Mrs. Quest sent us word … she told my uncle Tzvetan and me … that the FBI counterintelligence people stationed at the Moscow Embassy found you wandering in the back streets off the Ring Road. She said you couldn’t remember who you were or what had happened to you … she spoke of a trauma … she said it was better for everyone if you couldn’t remember. Oh, you fooled them, Jozef.” Samat started to whimper, tears glistening on his skeletal cheeks. “If she had suspected you of remembering, you would not have been permitted to leave Moscow alive.”

“I sensed that. I knew everything depended on convincing her I was suffering from amnesia.”

“It was the Oligarkh who ordered them to torture you,” Samat said with sudden vehemence. “He was convinced you had betrayed the Prigorodnaia operation. He needed to know to whom. Mrs. Quest needed to know to whom. It was a matter of damage control. If rot had set in, we needed to burn it out, so my uncle said. I tried to reason with him, Jozef. I told him you might have denounced the operation when you came to realize what it consisted of—but only to people on the inside. Only to Crystal Quest. I swore you would never go to the newspapers or the authorities. I told him you could be brought around to see things from our point of view. After all, we all worked for the same organization, didn’t we? We all marched to the same music. It wasn’t our business to pass judgment on the operation. The CIA gave us a compass heading and off we went. You were a soldier like me, like my uncle; you were the link between us and Mrs. Quest; between us and Langley.”

Martin had to lure Samat into filling in the blanks. “It was the scope of the Prigorodnaia operation that sickened me,” he said. “Nothing like that had ever been attempted before.”

Samat’s head bobbed restlessly; words spilled out, as if the sheer quantity of them filling the air could create a bond between him and the man he knew as Jozef. “When the CIA found my uncle Tzvetan, he was running a used-car dealership in Armenia. What attracted them to him was that his father and grandfather had been executed by the Bolsheviks; his brother, my father, had died in the camps; he himself had spent years in a Siberian prison. Tzvetan detested the Soviet regime and the Russians who ran it. He was ready to do anything to get revenge. So the CIA bankrolled him—with their money he cornered the used-car market in Moscow. Then, with the help of CIA largesse, I’m talking hundreds of millions, he branched out into the aluminum business. He made deals with the smelters, he bought three hundred railroad cars, he built a port facility in Siberia to offload alumina. Before long, he had cornered the aluminum market in Russia and amassed a fortune of dozens of billions of dollars. And still his empire grew—he dealt in steel and chrome and coal, he bought factories and businesses by the dozens, he opened banks to service the empire and launder the profits abroad. Which is where I came in. Tzvetan trusted me completely—I was the only one who understood how the Oligarkh’s empire was configured. It was all here in my head.”

“Then, once Tzvetan had established himself as an economic force, the CIA pushed him into politics.”

“If my uncle ingratiated himself with Yeltsin, it was because he was following Mrs. Quest’s game plan. When Yeltsin wanted to publish his first book, Tzvetan arranged the contracts and bought up the print run. The Yeltsin family suddenly discovered that they held shares in giant enterprises. Thanks to the Oligarkh, Yeltsin became a rich man. When Yeltsin ran for president of the Russian Federation in 1991, Tzvetan financed the campaign. Tzvetan was the one who funded Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard, the Presidential Security Service. It was only natural that when Yeltsin sought advice, he would turn to the leading figure in his inner circle, the Oligarkh.”

Martin began to see where the Prigorodnaia plot was going. “Yeltsin’s disastrous decision to free prices and willy-nilly transform Russia into a free-market economy in the early nineties unleashed hyperinflation and wiped out the pensions and savings of tens of millions of Russians. It threw the country into economic chaos—”

“The concept originated with Crystal Quest’s DDO people. My uncle was the one who convinced Yeltsin that a free-market economy would cure Russia’s ills.”

“The privatization of Soviet industrial assets, which looted the country’s wealth and funneled it into the hands of the Oligarkh and a handful of insiders like him—”

Samat was scraping his palms together. “It all came from the CIA’s Operations Directorate—the hyperinflation, the privatization, even Yeltsin’s decision to attack Chechnya and bog down the Russian army in a war they couldn’t win. You can understand where the Americans were coming from—the cold war was over, for sure, but America did not defeat the mighty Soviet Union only to have a mighty Russia rise like a phoenix from its ashes. The people at Langley could not take the risk that the transition from socialism to capitalism might succeed. So they got the Oligarkh, who detested the communist apparatchiki, who was only too happy to see Russia and the Russians sink into an economic swamp, to use his considerable influence on Yeltsin.”

Stella, watching Martin intently, saw him wince. For an instant she thought his leg must be acting up again. Then it dawned on her that the pain came from what Samat was saying: Martin had found the naked truth buried in Samat’s story. She had, too. “The CIA was running Russia!” she exclaimed.

“It was running Russia into the ground,” Martin agreed.

“That was the beauty of it,” Samat said, his voice shrill with jubilation. “We paid the Russians back for what they did to the Ugor-Zhilovs.”

Martin remembered what Crystal Quest had said to him the day she summoned him to Xing’s Mandarin restaurant under the pool hall. We didn’t hire your conscience, only your brain and your body. And then, one fine day, you stepped out of character—you stepped out of all your characters—and took what in popular idiom is called a moral stand.

At the time Martin didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about. Now the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place; now he understood why they’d convened a summit at Langley to decide whether to terminate his contract—or his life.

Samat, drained, puffed on the cigarette to calm his nerves. Martin’s found himself staring at the ash at the tip of Samat’s cigarette, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette. Martin associated the ash with the naked man kneeling at the edge of the crater, the one who had been caught in the black-and-white photograph peering over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror.

Samat, sucking on the cigarette, became aware of the ash, too. His words slurring with dread, he whispered, “Please. I ask you, Jozef. For the sake of my mother, who loved you like a son. Do not shoot me.”

“I’m not sure you should shoot him,” Stella said. “Then again, I’m not sure you shouldn’t. What is to be accomplished by shooting him?”

“Revenge is a manifestation of sanity. Shooting him would make me feel … perfectly sane.” Martin looked back at Samat, who was breathing noisily through his mouth, terrified that each breath would be his last. “Where is the Oligarkh?” Martin asked.

“I do not know.”

Martin raised the Tula-Tokarev to eye level and sighted on Samat’s forehead, directly between his eyes. Stella turned away. “When you lived in Kiryat Arba,” Martin reminded Samat, “you spent a lot of time on the phone with someone who had a 718 area code.”

“The phone records were destroyed. How could you know this?”

“Stella remembered seeing one of your phone bills.”

“I swear to you on my mother’s head, I do not know where the Oligarkh is. The 718 number was the home phone of the American manufacturer of artificial limbs that I imported to London for distribution to war zones.” Tears welled in Samat’s seaweed-green eyes. “For all I know, the Oligarkh may no longer be alive. In the Witness Protection Program, these things are tightly compartmented, precisely so that no one can get to him through me. Or to me through him.”

Stella said, very quietly, “He may be telling the truth.”

Samat clutched at the buoy Stella had thrown him. “I never meant to harm you,” he told her. “The marriage to your sister was a matter of convenience for both of us—she wanted to live in Israel and I had to get out of Russia quickly. I was incapable of sleeping with Ya’ara. You have to comprehend. A man can only be a man with a woman.”

“Which narrowed it down to Stella,” Martin said.

Samat avoided his eye. “A normal man has normal appetites …”

Martin held the pistol unwaveringly for several long seconds, then slowly let the front sight drop. “Your other uncle, the one who lives in Caesarea, claims you stole a hundred and thirty million dollars from six of his holding companies. He offered me a million dollars to find you.”

Samat glimpsed salvation. “I will pay you two million not to find me.”

“I don’t accept checks.”

Samat saw that he might be able to worm his way out of this predicament after all. “I have bearer shares hidden in the freezer of the icebox.”

“There is one other matter that needs to be arranged,” Martin informed him.

Confidence began seeping back into Samat’s voice. “Only name it,” he said, all business.

Stella spent the better part of the next morning on Samat’s phone trying to track down an Orthodox rabbi who would accommodate them. An old rabbi in Philadelphia gave her the number of a colleague in Tenafly, New Jersey; a recorded announcement at the Chabad Lubavitch Synagogue there suggested anyone calling with a weekend emergency try the rabbi’s home number, which rang and rang without anyone answering. A rabbi at Beth Hakneses Hachodosh in Rochester knew of a rabbi at Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, New York, who delivered religious divorces, but when Stella dialed the number she fell on a teenage daughter; her father, the rabbi, was away in Israel, she said. He did have a cousin who officiated at B’nai Jacob in Middletown, Pennsylvania. If this was an emergency, Stella could try phoning him. It was the Middletown rabbi who suggested she call Abraham Shulman, the rabbi at the Beth Israel Synagogue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Rabbi Shulman, an affable man with a booming voice, explained to Stella that what she needed was an ad hoc rabbinical board, composed of three Orthodox rabbis, to deliver the scroll of the get and witness the signatures. As luck would have it, he was sitting down to Sunday brunch with two of his colleagues, one from Manhattan, the other from the Bronx, both of them, like Shulman, Orthodox rabbis. Oh, dear, yes, it was unusual but the rabbinical board could witness the signing of the get by the husband even if the wife were not physically present and then forward the document to the wife’s rabbi in Israel for her signature, at which point the divorce would become final. Rabbi Shulman inquired how long it would take her and the putative husband to reach Crown Heights. Stella told the rabbi they could be there by late afternoon. She jotted down his directions: cross over from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, follow Flatbush Avenue down to Eastern Parkway, then follow Eastern Parkway until you reached Kingston Avenue. The synagogue filled the top three floors of number 745 Eastern Parkway on your left coming from New York, immediately after Kingston Avenue.

The three rabbis, looking somewhat the worse for brunch, were holding court in Shulman’s murky book-lined study on the ground floor under the synagogue. Shulman, the youngest of the three, was clean shaven with apple-shiny cheeks; the two other rabbis had straggly white beards. All three wore black suits and black fedoras propped high on their foreheads; on the two older rabbis it looked perfectly natural, on Shulman it produced a comic effect. “Which of you,” boomed Shulman, looking from Samat to Martin and back to Samat, “is the lucky future ex?”

Martin, one hand gripping the Tula-Tokarev in his jacket pocket, prodded Samat in the spine. “Who would believe,” Samat said under his breath as he shuffled across the thick carpet, “you went to all this trouble to find me for a divorce.”

“Did you say something?” inquired the rabbi to the right of Shulman.

“It is me, the divorcer,” Samat announced.

“What’s the mad rush to divorce?” the third rabbi asked. “Why couldn’t you wait until the shul opens on Monday morning?”

Stella improvised. “He’s booked on a flight to Moscow from Kennedy airport this evening.”

“There are Orthodox rabbis in Moscow,” Shulman noted.

In a bamboo cage set on a wooden stepladder next to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a green bird with a hooked bill and bright red plumes between its eyes hopped onto a higher trapeze and declared, clear as a bell, “Loz im zayn, loz im zayn.”

Rabbi Shulman looked embarrassed. “My parrot speaks Yiddish,” he explained. “Los im zayn means let him be.” He smiled at his colleagues. “Maybe Ha Shem, blessed be his Name, is trying to tell us something.” The rabbi turned back to Samat. “I assume you wouldn’t come all this way without identification.”

Samat handed his Israeli passport to the rabbi.

“You are Israeli?” Shulman said, plainly surprised. “You speak Hebrew?”

“I immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union. I speak Russian.”

“The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore,” Shulman pointed out.

“I meant Russia, of course,” Samat said.

“Excuse me for asking,” the oldest of the three rabbis said, “but you are Jewish?”

“My mother is Jewish, which makes me Jewish. The Israeli immigration authorities accepted the proofs of this when they let me into the country.”

Stella explained the general situation while Shulman took notes. Her sister, whose Israeli name was Ya’ara, daughter of the late Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner of Brooklyn, New York, currently lived in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank called Kiryat Arba. Ya’ara and Samat Ugor-Zhilov, here present, had been married by the Kiryat Arba rabbi, whose name was Ben Zion; Stella herself had been a witness at the marriage ceremony. Samat had subsequently abandoned his wife without granting her a religious divorce. This same Samat, here present, had had second thoughts about the matter and is now willing to put his signature to the document granting a religious divorce to his wife. She stepped forward and handed the rabbis a scrap of paper which spelled out the terms of the divorce. Samat’s signature was scrawled across the bottom.

The resplendent parrot descended to the lower trapeze and cried out, “Nu, shoyn! Nu, shoyn!” Shulman said, “That’s the Yiddish equivalent of Let’s put the show on the road.”

One of the older rabbis looked across the room at Martin. “And who are you?”

“That’s a good question, rabbi,” Martin said.

“Perhaps you would like to answer it,” Shulman suggested.

“My name is Martin Odum.”

Looking straight at Martin, Stella said, “He has deeper layers of identity than a name, rabbi. Fact is, he’s not absolutely sure who he is. But so what—women fall for men all the time who don’t know who they are.”

Shulman cleared his throat. The three rabbis bent over Samat’s passport. “The photograph in the passport doesn’t look anything like this gentleman,” one of the rabbis observed.

“I did not have a beard when I came to Israel,” Samat explained.

Stella said, “Look carefully—you can tell by the eyes it’s the same man.”

“Only women are able to identify men by their eyes,” Shulman remarked. He addressed Samat. “You affirm that you are the Samat Ugor-Zhilov who is married to—” he glanced at his notes—“Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov of Kiryat Arba?”

“He does affirm it,” Stella said.

The rabbi favored her with a pained look. “He must speak for himself.”

“I do,” Samat said. He glanced at Martin, leaning against the wall near the door with one hand in his jacket pocket. “I affirm it.”

“Is there any issue from this marriage?”

When Samat looked confused, Stella translated. “He’s asking if you and Ya’ara had children.” She addressed Shulman directly. “The answer is: You can’t have children when you don’t consummate the marriage.”

One of the older rabbis chided her. “Lady, given that he is not contesting the divorce, I think you are telling us more than we need to know.”

Shulman said, “Do you, Samat Ugor-Zhilov, here present, stand ready to grant your wife, Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov, a religious divorce—what we call a get—of your own free will and volition, so help you God?”

“Yes, yes, I will give her the damn get,” Samat replied impatiently. “You guys use a lot of words to describe something as uncomplicated as a divorce.”

“Kabbalah teaches us,” Shulman noted as his two colleagues nodded in agreement, “that God created the universe out of the energy in words. Out of the energy of your words, Mr. Ugor-Zhilov, we will create a divorce.”

Stella smiled at Martin across the room. “It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that words have energy.”

Samat looked bewildered. “Who is this Kabbalah character and what does he have to do with my divorce?”

“Let’s move on,” Shulman suggested. “Under the terms of the get,” he went on, reading from Stella’s scrap of paper, “your wife will keep any and all property and assets that you may possess in Israel, including one split-level house in the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, including one Honda automobile, including any and all bank accounts in your name in Israeli banks.”

“I have already agreed to this. I signed the paper.”

“We must ascertain verbally that you understand what you have signed,” explained Shulman.

“That you were not coerced into signing,” added one of his colleagues.

“According to the terms of the divorce,” the rabbi continued, “you are putting on deposit with this rabbinical board one million dollars in bearer shares, with the intention that the said one million dollars, less a generous $25,000 donation to a Jewish program to relocate Jews to Israel, will be transferred to the ownership of your wife, Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov.”

Samat glanced at Martin, who nodded imperceptibly. “I agree, I agree to it all,” Samat said hurriedly.

“That being the case,” the rabbi said, “we will now prepare the scroll of the get for your signature. The document, along with the $975,000 in bearer shares, will be sent by Federal Express to rabbi Ben Zion in Kiryat Arba. Ya’ara will be summoned before a rabbinical board there to sign the get, at which point you and your wife will be formally divorced.”

“How long will it take to prepare the scroll?” Martin asked from the door.

“Forty-five minutes, give or take,” Shulman said. “Can we offer you gentlemen and the lady coffee while we prepare the document?”

Later, Martin and Samat waited outside the Synagogue while Stella brought around the Packard. Martin slid into the backseat alongside Samat. “Where are we off to now?” Stella asked.

“Take us to Little Odessa.”

“Why are we going to the Russian section of Brooklyn?” Stella asked.

“Get us there and you’ll see,” Martin said.

Stella shrugged. “Why not?” she said. “You certainly knew what you were doing up to now.”

She piloted the large Packard through rush-hour traffic on Ocean Parkway, past block after block of nearly identical gray-grim tenements with colorful laundry flapping from lines on the roofs. Twice Samat tried to start a conversation with Martin, who sat with the butt of the Tula-Tokarev in his right fist and his left hand gripping Samat’s right wrist. Each time Martin cut him off with a curt uh-huh. Up front Stella had to laugh. “You won’t get far with him when he’s in his one of his uh-huh moods,” she called over her shoulder.

“Turn left when you get to Brighton Beach Avenue,” Martin instructed her. “It’s the next traffic light.”

“You’ve been here before,” Samat said.

“Had two clients in Little Odessa before I became a famous international detective tracking down missing husbands,” Martin said. “One involved a kidnapped Rottweiler. The other involved a neighborhood crematorium run by Chechen immigrants.”

Samat pulled a face. “I do not comprehend why America lets Chechens into this country. The only good Chechens are dead Chechens.”

Stella asked Samat, “Have you been to Chechnya?”

Samat said, “Did not need to go to Chechnya to come across Chechens. Moscow was swarming with them.”

Martin couldn’t resist. “Like the one they called the Ottoman.”

The seaweed in Samat’s eyes turned dark, as if they had caught the reflection of a storm cloud. “What do you know about the Ottoman?”

“I know what everyone knows,” Martin said guilelessly. “That he and his lady friend were found one fine morning hanging upside down from a lamppost near the Kremlin wall.”

“The Ottoman was not an innocent.”

“I heard he’d been caught doing fifty in a forty-kilometer zone.”

Samat finally figured out his leg was being pulled. “Speeding in Moscow can be dangerous for your health,” he agreed. “Also littering.”

“Turn left on Fifth Street, just ahead. Park on the left where it says no parking anytime.”

“In front of the crematorium?” Stella asked as she turned into the street.

“Uh-huh.”

“Who are we meeting?” Samat inquired uneasily as Stella eased the Packard alongside the curb and killed the motor.

“It’s almost eight,” Martin said. “We’ll wait here until it’s dark and the streets are empty.”

“I’m going to close my eyes for a few minutes,” Stella announced.

Stella’s forty winks turned into an hour-and-ten-minute nap; all the driving she’d done that day, not to mention the worrying, had taken its toll on her. Samat, too, dozed, or appeared to, his chin sinking onto his chest, his shut eyelids fluttering. Martin kept a tight grip on the butt of the Tula-Tokarev. Curiously, he didn’t feel bushed despite his having slept fitfully on Samat’s couch the night before (woken every few hours by Samat calling from the locked closet that he needed to go to the toilet). What kept Martin alert, what kept the adrenalin flowing, was his conviction that revenge was a manifestation of sanity; that if he played this thing out, his days of being imperfectly sane were numbered.

As darkness settled over Little Odessa, the Russians began heading back to their apartments. Behind them, on Brighton Beach Avenue, traffic thinned out. Lights appeared in windows on both sides of Fifth Street; the bulb in the vestibule of the funeral parlor across the street came on. Two floors above the door with the gold lettering that read “Akhdan Abdulkhadzhiev & Sons—Crematorium,” an elaborate chandelier fitted with Christmas tree bulbs blazed into life and the scratchy sound of an accordion playing melodies that sounded decidedly Central Asian drifted out of an open window. A lean man and a teenage boy dragged a pushcart filled with tins of halavah down the middle of the street and turned into one of the driveways near the end of the block. Two young girls skipping rope as they made their way home passed the Packard. An old woman carrying a Russian avoska filled with vegetables hurried up the steps of a nearby brownstone. When the street appeared deserted, Martin leaned forward and nudged Stella on the shoulder.

She angled her rearview mirror so that she could see Martin in it. “How long did I sleep?”

“A few minutes.”

Samat’s eyes blinked open and he swallowed a yawn. He looked up and down the street. “I do not understand why we have come to the Russian section of Brooklyn,” he said anxiously. “If it is to meet someone—”

Martin could hear a voice in his ear. For once in your life, don’t weigh the pros and cons—just act violently.

“Dante?”

You don’t want to shoot him, Martin—too noisy. Use the butt. Break his knee cap.

Stella said, “Who are you talking to, Martin?”

Don’t think about it, just do it, for Christsake!

“I’m talking to myself,” Martin murmured.

He was sorely tempted—to jailbreak, to set foot outside the Martin Odum legend; to become, if only for an instant, someone as impulsive as Dante Pippen. Clutching the Tula-Tokarev by the barrel, Martin slammed the grip down hard on Samat’s right knee. The sharp crunch of the bone splintering filled the Packard. Samat stared in disbelief at his knee as a brownish stain soaked into the fabric of his trousers. Then the pain reached his brain and he cried out in agony. Tears spurted from his eyes.

Stella twisted in the seat, breathing hard. “Martin, have you gone mad?”

“I’m going sane.”

Samat, cradling his shattered knee cap with both hands, thrashed in pain. Martin said, very softly, “You killed Kastner, didn’t you?”

“Get me a doctor.”

“You killed Kastner,” Martin repeated. “Admit it and I will put an end to your suffering.”

“I had nothing to do with Kastner’s death. The Oligarkh had him eliminated when the Quest woman told him you were trying to find me. My uncle and Quest … they wanted to cut off all the leads.”

Stella said, “How did the killers get into the house without breaking a door or a window?”

“Quest supplied the keys to the doors and the alarm box.”

“You killed the Chinese girl on the roof, too,” Martin said.

Samat’s nose began to run. “Quest’s people told the Oligarkh about the beehives on the roof. He sent a marksman to the roof across the street. The marksman mistook the Chinese girl for you. Her death was an accident.”

“Where is the Oligarkh?”

“For the love of God, I must get to a doctor.”

“Where is the Oligarkh?”

“I told you, I do not know.”

“I know you know.”

“We speak only on the phone.”

“The 718 number?”

When Samat didn’t say anything, Martin reached across Samat and pushed open the door on his side of the car. “Read the name on the crematorium door,” he ordered.

Samat tried to make out the name through the tears blurring his vision. “I cannot see—”

“It says Akhdan Abdulkhadzhiev. Abdulkhadzhiev is a Chechen name. The crematorium is the Chechen business that was accused of extracting gold teeth before cremating the corpses. If you don’t give me the phone number, I’ll push you out of the car and ring the bell and tell the Chechens sitting down to supper upstairs that the man who hanged the Ottoman upside down from a lamppost in Moscow is on their doorstep. There isn’t a Chechen alive who doesn’t know the story, who won’t jump at the chance to settle old scores.”

“No, no. The number … the number is 718-555-9291.”

“If you’re lying, I’ll break your other knee.”

“On my mother’s head, I swear it. Now take me to a doctor.”

Martin got out of the Packard and came around to the other side of the car and, taking a grip on Samat’s wrists, pulled him from the backseat across the sidewalk. He propped Samat up so that he was sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the door. Then Martin pressed the buzzer for several seconds. Two floors over his head a young woman appeared in the open window.

“Crematorium closed for the day,” she shouted down.

“Crematorium about to open,” Martin called back. “You ever hear of a Chechen nicknamed the Ottoman?”

The woman in the window ducked back into the room. A moment later the needle was plucked off the record. Two men stuck their heads out of the window. “What about the Ottoman?” an older man with a flamboyant mustache yelled down.

“The Armenian from the Slavic Alliance who lynched him and his lady friend within sight of the Kremlin is on your doorstep. His name is Samat Ugor-Zhilov. Your Chechen friends have been looking all over the world for him. There’s no rush to come get him—he’s not going anywhere on a shattered knee.”

Samat whimpered, “For the love of God, for the sake of my mother, you cannot leave me here.”

Martin could sense the excitement in the room above his head. Footsteps could be heard thundering down the stairs. “Start the motor,” he called to Stella. A current of pain shot through his game leg as he made his way around the car and climbed in next to the driver. “Let’s go,” he said. “Don’t run any red lights.”

Stella, biting her lip to keep from trembling, steered the Packard away from the curb and headed down the empty street. Martin turned in the seat to watch the Chechens drag Samat into the crematorium. Stella must have seen it in her rearview mirror. “Oh, Martin,” she said, “what will they do to him?”

“I suppose they will extract the gold teeth from his mouth with a pair of pliers and then put him in one of their cheapest coffins and nail the lid shut and light off the burning fiery furnace and cremate him alive.” He touched the back of her hand on the steering wheel. “Samat left behind him a trail of blood—the Ottoman and his lady friend, your father, my Chinese friend Minh, the scavengers locked in cages on an island in the Aral Sea who died miserably when Samat used them as guinea pigs to test biowarfare viruses that he eventually gave to Saddam Hussein. The list is long.”

Using hand gestures, Martin directed Stella back into the heart of Brooklyn. When they reached Eastern Parkway he had her pull over to the curb. He retrieved the paper bag from the trunk and, taking her arm, drew her to a bench on one side of the parkway. “There’s a million dollars in bearer shares left in the bag,” Martin explained, handing it to her. “Go to ground in a motel on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel for the night. Tomorrow drive to Philadelphia and go to the biggest bank you can find and cash these in and open an account in your name. Then drive to Jonestown in Pennsylvania. Not Johnstown. Jonestown. Find a small house, something with white clapboard and storm windows and a wrap around porch at the edge of town and a view across the corn fields. It needs to have a yard where we can raise chickens. There’s a monastery not far away over the rise—you want to be able to hear its carillon bells from the house.”

“How do you know about Jonestown and the monastery?”

“Lincoln Dittmann and I both come from Jonestown. Funny part is we didn’t know each other back then. My family moved to Brooklyn when I was eight but Lincoln was brought up in Pennsylvania. I’d almost forgotten about Jonestown. He reminded me.”

“Who’s Lincoln Dittmann?”

“Someone I came across in another incarnation.”

“What do I do when I find the house?”

“Buy it.”

“Why don’t you come with me?”

“I have some loose ends to take care of. I’ll turn up in Jonestown when I’ve finished.”

“How will you find me?”

“Jonestown is a small town. I’ll ask for the gorgeous dish with a permanent squint in her eyes and a ghost of a smile on her lips.”

Stella relished the coolness of the night air. The headlights streaking past led her to imagine that she and Martin were stranded on an island of stillness in a world of perpetual motion. “Do you really remember what happened to you in Moscow?” she asked.

He smiled. “No. A curtain screened off the fragment of my life that I lived under the legend Jozef Kafkor. But what I’ve lost won’t change anything for us. The part of Martin Odum’s life that I want to remember begins here.”