Legends (22 page)

The Supervisor, Perishables took the question seriously. “You go ahead and replace the items in question and send us the bill,” he said. “If you address it to Heathrow, Perishables, it should get here, shouldn’t it, lads and ladies? Everyone knows who we are. Mind if I ask how long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”

“No. Ask.”

Supervisor, Perishables didn’t crack a smile. “How long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”

“My name is Odum. Martin Odum. I’m in Britain to tell anti-English jokes that will spread across the country like wildfire and take people’s minds off the drudgery of day-to-day life. I plan to stay as long as folks keep laughing.”

“He’s certainly original,” the black man told his associates.

Peaches-and-cream accompanied Martin down to the arrival hall. “No hurt feelings, I hope, gov’nor,” he said, falling back into his phony cockney accent and trying to sound ironic.

Following the signs leading to the underground, Martin quickly spotted the two men who were following him, one about fifteen paces behind, the other ten paces behind the first. What gave them away was their habit of concentrating on the windows of the boutiques every time he turned in their direction. As Martin reached the escalator down to the train level, the first man peeled away, the second closed the gap and a third hove into view behind him. The resources they were devoting to keep track of Lincoln Dittmann made Martin feel important; it had been a long time since anyone thought he was interesting enough to lay on a staggered tail. As always in situations like this, Martin was more preoccupied with the agents he didn’t see than the ones he was meant to spot. He took the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and the escalator to the street, then leaned against the side of a kiosk to give his game leg a rest. After awhile he strolled toward Tottenham Court Road, stopping at a chemist shop to buy toothpaste and shaving cream, eventually at a pub with a neon sign sizzling over the door that brought back memories of the Beirut waterfront and Dante’s Alawite prostitute named Djamillah. He settled onto a stool at the dimly-lit end of the bar and sipped at his half pint of lager until half of it was down the hatch. Opening his valise, he slipped the packet of false identity papers into the white silk bandanna, then mopped his brow with it and stuffed it into the pocket of his suit jacket. Hefting his small valise onto the bar, folding his Burberry across it, he asked the bartender to keep an eye on his things while he used the loo in the back. Martin didn’t even bother checking the tails, two outside in the street, one at a corner table in the front of the pub; they were all young, and young meant green, so they would fall for the oldest trick on the books: They would keep their eyes glued to the half consumed glass of lager and the valise with the raincoat on it, and wait for him to return. Depending on their relationship with the Supervisor, Perishables, they might or might not report that Martin had gone missing when he failed to come back.

Martin remembered this particular men’s lavatory from a stint in London a lifetime ago. He’d been on his way to the Soviet Union and stopped off for a briefing from MI6’s East European desk. What cover had he been using then? It must have been the original Martin Odum legend because Dittmann and Pippen came later, or so it seemed to him. In a remote corner of a lobe of his brain he had filed away one of those tradecraft details that field hands collected as if they were rare stamps: This particular lavatory had a fire door that was locked, but could be opened in an emergency by breaking a glass and removing the key hanging on a hook behind it. To Martin’s way of thinking, this clearly qualified as an emergency. He found the glass and retrieved the key and opened the fire door. Moments later he found himself in a narrow passage that gave onto a side street and, as luck would have it, a taxi stand.

“Paddington,” he told the driver.

He changed taxis twice more and only gave his real destination to the final driver. “Golders Green,” he said, settling into the backseat and enjoying his fleeting triumph over the warm bodies from five.

“Any particular place on Golders Green?” the driver asked over the intercom.

“You can let me off near the clock at the top. I’ll walk from there.”

“Right you are, gov’nor. You American, are you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s the accent, gov’nor. I know American when I hear it.”

“Actually I’m Polish,” Martin had said, “but I’ve lived in America and it rubbed off.”

The driver had tittered into the microphone. “I can tell someone what’s pulling me leg, gov’nor. If you’re Polish, that makes me an Eskimo.”

Martin had paid off the taxi in front of the Golders Green underground station. Standing under the word “Courage” engraved in the stone monument at the top of Golders Green, he took his bearings, then set off down the broad avenue awash in sunlight and filled with midday pedestrians Filipino maids pushing old ladies tucked into wheel chairs, teenage boys in embroidered skull caps careening past on mountain bikes, dozens of ultra religious women wearing wigs and long dresses window shopping in front of stores with signs in English and Hebrew. Martin found a second-hand store run by a Jewish charity and bought himself an old valise that looked as if it had been around the world several times. He made a slit in the frayed silk lining under the lid and hid his stash of documents, then filled the valise with threadbare but serviceable clothing. He came across a second-hand Aquascutum that they were practically giving away because the belt was missing and the hem was in tatters. At a chemists, he bought more toothpaste, a disposable razor and a small tube of shaving cream. On Woodstock Avenue off Golders Green he spotted a ramshackle house next to a synagogue with a sign on the unkempt lawn advertising rooms for rent. He paid the grumpy landlady for a week in advance, stored his gear and went around the corner for a bite to eat at a kosher delicatessen across the street from a church. Midafternoon he walked up Golders Green to the Chinese Medicinal Center for a session of acupuncture on his game leg. When he complained that his leg felt sorer after the acupuncture, the old Chinese man, plucking the long needles deftly out of Martin’s skin, said it was well known that things had to get worse before they could get better. Leaving a ten pound note on the counter, Martin promised he would bear that in mind. Starting back toward the rooming house, he noticed he was able to walk with less pain than before; he wondered whether it was due to the acupuncture needles or the power of suggestion. He bought a phone card at a tobacco shop and ducked into a fire-engine red booth on the corner of Woodstock and Golders Green that had a burnt phone book dangling from a chain. He rummaged in his wallet for the scrap of paper with the phone number that Elena had found on the back of the strudel recipe and, inserting his plastic card, dialed it.

Martin retrieved Dante Pippen’s rusty Irish accent for the occasion. “And who would I be speaking to, then?” he inquired when a female voice came on the line.

“Mrs. Rainfield, dear.”

“Good morning to you, Mrs. Rainfield. This is Patrick O’Faolain from the phone company. I’m up on a pole on Golders Green trying to sort out your lines. Could you do me the favor of pressing the number five and the number seven on your phone, in that order.”

“Five, then seven?”

“That’s the ticket, Mrs. Rainfield.”

“Did you hear it?”

“Loud and clear. Do it once more to be sure, will you, now?”

“Okay?”

“Beautiful. We ought to be hiring the likes of you.”

“Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Don’t ask me how but your cable seems to have gotten itself twined around your neighbors’ lines. One of them complained she heard cross talk when she tried to use her phone. Did you experience any static on yours, Mrs. Rainfield?”

“Now that you mention it, the phone did seem fuzzier than usual this morning.”

“You ought to be hearing me clear as a bell now.”

“I am, thank you.”

“We spend most of our time climbing up phone poles to fix things that aren’t broken. Now and then it’s gratifying to fix something that is. You get half the credit it was child’s play once you hit the five and the seven. For my work sheet I’ll be needing your full name and an address to go with your phone.”

“I’m Doris Rainfield,” the woman said, and she gave an address on North End Road, a continuation of Golders Green, behind the railroad station.

“Thanks a mill.” Ta.

Martin pressed the buzzer next to the enormous steel door with “Soft Shoulder” engraved on a brass plaque and looked up into the security camera. There was a burst of static over the intercom. A woman’s nasal voice surfed above the static.

“If you’re delivering, you need to go round to the loading dock in back.”

“Mr. Martin Odum,” Martin called, “come to see the director of Soft Shoulder.”

“Are you the bloke what’s shipping the prostheses to Bosnia?”

“Afraid not. I was sent by a friend of the director’s, a Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov.”

“Wait a min, love.”

The static gave way to an eerie quiet. A moment later the woman whom Martin took for Mrs. Rainfield came back on the intercom. “Mr. Rabbani, he wants to know how you know Mr. Ugor-Zhilov.”

“Tell him,” Martin said, employing the phrase Kastner had used the day they met on President Street, “we’re birds of a feather.”

“Come again?”

“Yes, well, you can tell Mr. Rabbani that I know Samat from Israel.”

There was another interval of silence. Then a discreet electric cur rent reached the lock in the door and it clicked open the width of a finger. Martin pushed it wide open and strode into the warehouse. He heard the door click closed behind him as he headed down the cement passageway lined with calendars from the 1980s, each with a photograph of a spreadeagled movie starlet flirting with nakedness. In the glass enclosed cubical at the end of the passageway, a young woman with pointed breasts and short hair the color and texture of straw sat behind a desk, painting her fingernails fuchsia. Martin poked his head through the open door. “You will be Doris Rainfield,” he guessed.

The woman looked up, intrigued. “Samat went and told you ‘bout me, did he, dear?” She batted the fingers of her right hand in the air to dry the nail polish. “I like Samat, I do. Oh, he’s one for putting on airs, waltzing in with that topcoat of’is flung over ‘is shoulders like it was some kinda cape or other. He looked like the sheik in one of them Rudy Valentino silent period pictures, if you get my drift.”

“I do get your drift, Mrs. Rainfield.”

The woman lowered her voice to share a confidence. “Truth is I’m not Mrs. Rainfield. I used to be Mrs. Rainfield but I got myself legally hitched six weeks and three days back to Nigel Froth, which makes me Mrs. Froth, doesn’t it, dear? Do you recognize the name? My Nigel’s a world class snooker player. Made the quarter finals of the U.K. snooker championship last year, lost to the bloke who came in second, he did, which was a feather in ‘is cap, I’m referring to Nigel’s cap, not the bloke who came in second’s cap. I still use my first husband’s name at the office because that’s what Mr. Rabbani calls me. All the paperwork ‘ere is in the name of Rainfield and he says it’d be a bloody pain in the you know what to switch over.”

Martin leaned against the door jamb. “Does Mrs. Rainfield act any differently than Mrs. Froth?”

“I s’pose she does, now that you mention it. My Mr. Froth fancies me in miniskirts and tight sweaters, he does. Mr. Rainfield wouldn’t ‘ave let me outa me house dressed like this. It’s a lot like Samat’s cape, isn’t it, dear? What you wear is who you want to be.” Fluttering unnaturally long lashes, Mrs. Rainfield pointed out the door at the bitter end of the passageway with her eyes. “Through there, then cross the warehouse on a diagonal and you’ll fall on Mr. Rabbani’s bailiwick. His factotum, an Egyptian named Rachid trust me, you won’t miss him minds the door.”

“Is Rachid his real name or is it a matter of Mr. Rabbani not wanting to redo the paperwork?”

Mrs. Rainfield giggled appreciatively.

Martin said, “Thank you” and started down the corridors created by stacks of cartons, all of them stencilled with the word “Prosthesis” and “Arm” or “Leg” and a measurement in inches and centimeters, along with a notation in smaller print that the articles had been manufactured in the United States of America. Above Martin’s head, diffused sunlight streamed through skylights stained with soot and bird droppings. A heavy-set man with unshaven jowls and untidy hair, clearly the body guard, loomed beyond the last cartons. A handwritten nametag pinned to the wide lapel of his double-breasted suit jacket identified him as Rachid.

“You carrying?” he inquired, sizing Martin up with eyes that conveyed indifference to the visitor’s fate in the unlikely event he resisted inspection.

Martin played a role he wasn’t accustomed to: innocent. “Carrying what?”

Rachid snapped, “Something the municipal police might mistake for a handgun.”

Grinning, Martin spread his legs apart and raised his arms. The bodyguard frisked him very professionally, passing his hand so high up the crotch that he grazed his penis with his knuckles, causing Martin to shudder.

“You ticklish, then?” the bodyguard remarked with a smirk. He inclined his head in the direction of a door with a neatly lettered plastic placard on it that said “Taletbek Rabbani Export.” Martin knocked. After a moment he knocked again and heard the scratchy voice of an old man call out weakly, “So what are you waiting on, my son, a hand delivered invite?”

Looking like a parenthesis, Taletbek Rabbani sat on a high stool hunched over a high desk, a thick cigarette dangling from his bone-dry lips, a smog of smoke hovering over his bald head like a rain cloud. An old man who must have been nudging ninety, he was not much thicker than the pencil clasped in his arthritic fingers. A tuft of coarse white hair protruded from under his lower lip and served as a receptacle for the ash that dropped off the burning end of the cigarette. A swell of warm air enveloped Martin as he stepped into the room; the old man kept his office heated to near sauna temperatures. Settling onto a tattered settee with the tag “Imported from Sri Lanka” still attached to one spindly wooden leg, Martin could hear the water gurgling through the radiators. “Taletbek Rabbani sounds like a Tajik name,” he remarked. “If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say you were a Tajik from the steppes of the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. I seem to remember there was a tribal chief named Rabbani who presided over a cluster of mountain villages near the frontier with Uzbekistan.”