Legends (34 page)
ganja, hemp, hashish, bhang, sinsemilla, cocaine, crack, angel dust, horse, methadone, LSD, PCP, uppers, downers. Only identify it, Radek will find it for less lousy U.S. dollars than you pay me a day.”
“I’ve never even heard of half these things,” Martin said. “What I’m wanting is to stretch my legs when we’re within walking distance of the Vysehrad Station.”
“Next stop,” Radek said, obviously disappointed that his procurement talents were not being put to the test. He plucked at the cord running the length of the trolley above the windows as if it were a guitar string. Up front a bell sounded. As the trolley ground to a halt, the doors scraped open. Once on the sidewalk, Radek pointed with his nose. In the distance, on the other side of the wide street, Martin could make out a shabby communist gothic structure trapping the last quarter hour of sunlight slanting in over the Vltava on its dilapidated roof, which was crawling with pigeons. He turned to Radek and offered his hand. “I won’t be needing your services anymore,” he announced.
Radek looked dejected. “You paid for ten hours, Mister. I still owe you seven and a half.”
“Consider the unused hours a gratuity.” When Radek still didn’t shake hands, Martin brought his own up to his eye and snapped off a friendly salute. “Good luck to you in medical school, Radek. I hope you find a cure for Alzheimer’s before Alzheimer’s sets in.”
“I kick myself for asking someone like you only thirty lousy crowns an hour,” Radek muttered as he turned and headed in the opposite direction.
Sucking on a Beedie, Martin strolled down Svobodova Street in the direction of the river. He passed a row of apartment buildings, one with the date “1902” etched over the door and a “Flat for Sale” sign in English on the inside of a ground floor window. Across the street loomed the Vysehrad Station in all its communist-era decadence. The station consisted of a central carcass and two broken wings. Dirty white stucco peeled away from the facade like sunburnt skin, exposing the dirty red bricks beneath. The windows on the Svobodova side were boarded over, though there were hints of fluorescent light seeping between the cracks in several of the second-floor windows that weren’t well jointed. The pigeons, in twos and threes, were fluttering away from the roof in search of the last rays of sun as Martin made his way back up Svobodova, this time on the station side of the street. Trolleys clattered by, causing the ground to tremble underfoot. Behind the station a commuter train sped past in the direction of Centrum. Dog-eared posters advertising Hungarian vacuum cleaners and reconditioned East German Trabants were thumb tacked to the boards covering the ground floor windows. Near the gate leading to a path around the side of the left wing of the station, someone had chalked graffiti on the wall: The Oklahoma City bomb was the first shot of World War III. Martin eased open the gate on its rusty hinges, climbed the brick steps and walked around to the back of the station. The passage was obviously in daily use because the weeds and vines on either side had been cut away from the brick footpath. Making his way along what used to be the platform when the station had been in use, Martin glanced into one of the wings through a sooty window shielded by rusting metal bars. Inside, two young men whom he took to be gypsies, wearing vests and corduroy trousers tucked into the tops of leather boots, were emptying large cartons and setting out what looked like packets of medicines on a long trestle table. Two young women dressed in long colorful skirts were repacking the items into smaller boxes and sealing them with masking tape. One of the young men caught sight of Martin and gestured with his thumb toward the main station doors further down the platform. Martin nodded and, a moment later, pushed through the double door into the station’s once-ornate central hall, fallen into dilapidation and smelling of wet plaster, evidence that someone had tried to patch over the worst of the building’s wounds. A broken sign over the door read ” Vychod Exit.” The tiles on the floor, many of them cracked, shifted under his feet. A wide stairway curled up toward the second floor. Painted on the wall above the stairway were the words “Soft” and “Shoulder.” A squat dog with a blunt nose stood on the top landing, yelping in a hoarse voice at the intruder. A handsome, elegantly dressed woman in her fifties peered down from the railing. “If you are looking for Soft Shoulder, do come up,” she called. “Don’t mind the dog. His bite is worse than his bark, but I will lock him up.” Reaching for the dog’s leash, the woman pulled him, still yelping, into a room and shut the door. With the dog barking behind the door she turned back toward Martin, who was leaning on the banister to take the weight off his game leg as he climbed toward her. A half dozen thin Indian bracelets jangled on her thin wrist as she held out a slender hand. “My name is Zuzana Slanska,” she said as Martin took her hand.
He noticed that her fingers were weedy, her nails bitten to the quick, her eyes rheumy. He suspected that the wrinkled smile on her gaunt lips had been worn too many times without laundering. “Mine’s Odum,” he said. “Martin Odum.”
“What African country are you buying for?”
Figuring he had nothing to lose, Martin said the first thing that came into his head. “The Ivory Coast.”
“We don’t often deal with clients in person, Mr. Odum. Most of our business is mail order. As a matter of record, who sent you to us?”
“An associate of Samat’s named Taletbek Rabbani.” He produced the back of the envelope with Rabbani’s barely legible scrawl on it and showed it to the woman.
A shadow passed over her face. “News of Mr. Rabbani’s death reached us earlier this week. When and where did you meet him?”
“The same place you met him at his warehouse behind the train station in the Golders Green section of London. I was probably the last person to see him alive not counting the Chechens who murdered him.”
“The small item in the British newspaper made no mention of Chechens.”
“It may be that Scotland Yard doesn’t know this detail. It may be they know it but do not want to tip their hand.”
Smiling nervously, the woman led Martin into a large oval room lit by several naked neon fixtures suspended from the ceiling. The three windows in the office were covered with planking, reminding Martin of the time Dante Pippen had followed Djamillah into the mercantile office above the bar in Beirut the windows there had been boarded over, too. He looked around, taking in the room. Large cartons with “This Side Up” stenciled on them were stacked against one wall. A young woman in a loose fitting sweater and faded blue jeans sat at a desk, typing with two fingers on a vintage table-model Underwood. At the edge of the desk, a scroll of facsimile paper spilled from a fax machine into a carton on the floor. A loose-leaf book lay open on a low glass table filled with coffee stains and overflowing ashtrays. The woman motioned Martin to a seat on the automobile banquette against the wall and settled onto a low three-legged stool facing him, her crossed ankles visible through the thick glass of the table. “I assume Mr. Rabbani explained how we operate here. In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we do business out of this defunct station to reduce the overhead and we only sell our generic medicines in bulk. Is there anything in particular you are looking for, Mr. Odum? Our best sellers are the Tylenol generic, acetaminophen, the Valium generic, diazepam, the Sudafed generic, pseudo ephedrine the Kenacort generic, triamcinolone. Please feel free to thumb through the loose-leaf catalogue. The labels of our generic medicines are pasted onto the pages. I am not aware of any particular epidemic threatening the Ivory Coast aside from the HIV virus we unfortunately do not yet have access to generic drugs for AIDS, but hope governments will put pressure on the drug conglomerates …” She gazed at her visitor, a sudden question visible in her eyes. “You didn’t mention your medical credentials, Mr. Odum. Are you a trained doctor or a public health specialist?”
Another commuter train roared by behind the station. When it had passed, Martin said, “Neither.”
Zuzana Slanska’s fingers came up to touch the small Star of David attached to the chain around her neck. “I am not sure I comprehend you.
Martin leaned forward. “I have a confession to make. I am not here to buy generic medicines.” He looked directly into her rheumy eyes. “I have come to find out more about Samat’s project concerning the exchange of the bones of the Lithuanian saint for the Jewish Torah scrolls.”
“Oh!” The woman glanced at the secretary typing up order forms across the room. “It’s a long story,” she said softly, “and I shall badly need a brandy and several cigarettes to get me through it.”
Zuzana Slanska leaned toward Martin so that he could light her cigarette with a match from the book advertising Prague crystal. “I
have never smoked a Beedie before,” she noted, sinking back, savoring the taste of the Indian cigarette. She pulled it from her mouth and carefully examined it. “Is there marijuana mixed with the tobacco?” she asked.
Martin shook his head. “You’re smelling the eucalyptus leaves.” She took another drag on the Beedie. “I am wary of the experts who argue so passionately that smoking is dangerous for your health,” she remarked, the words emerging from her mouth along with the smoke. As she turned away to glance at the two fat men sucking on thick cigars at a nearby table, it struck Martin that she had the profile of a woman who must have been a stunner in her youth. “There are a great many things dangerous for your health,” she added, turning back. “Don’t you agree?”
Concentrating on his own cigarette, Martin said, “For instance?” “For instance, living under high tension wires. For instance, eating fast food with artificial flavoring. For instance, being right when your government is wrong.” She favored the old waiter with a worn smile as he carefully set out two snifters half-filled with three-star Jerez brandy, along with a shallow Dresden bowl brimming with peanuts. “I am speaking from bitter experience,” she added, “but you surely will have grasped that from the tone of my voice.”
She had led him on foot across the river to the salon du the on the top floor of a gaudy hotel that had only recently opened for business. From the window next to the table at the back of the enormous room, Martin could see what he’d spotted from the plane: the hills rimming Prague and the communist-era apartment buildings spilling over them. “My husband,” the woman was saying, caught up in her own story, “was a medical doctor practicing in Vinohrady, which is a district of Prague behind the museum. I worked as his nurse. The two of us joined a literary circle that met once a week to discuss books. Oh, I can tell you, it was an exhilarating time for us. My husband was fearless he used to all the time joke that old age was not for the weak of heart.” She gulped down some of the brandy and puffed furiously on her Beedie, as if time were running out; as if she had to relate her life’s story before her life ended. “Tell me if all this bores you to tears, Mr. Odum.”
“The opposite is true,” Martin assured her. “It mesmerizes me to tears.”
Zuzana Slanska hiked one slim shoulder inside her tailored Parisian jacket. “We were ardent Marxists, my husband and I. We were convinced it was the great Russian bear that had suffocated communism and not the other way around. Our Czech hero, Alexander Dubcek, was still a loyal party-line apparatchik when we began signing petitions demanding reforms. The Soviet-appointed proconsuls who reigned over us could not distinguish between dissidents who were anticommunist and those, like us, who were pro-communist but argued that it had gone wrong; that it needed to be set right in order for Marxism to survive. Or if they did distinguish between us, they calculated that our form of dissidence was the more threatening of the two. And so we suffered the same fate as the others.”
Martin could see the muscles on her face contorting with heartache remembered so vividly that she seemed to be experiencing it now. “You must know the story,” she rushed on, barely bothering to breathe. “The one about the NKVD commissar admitting to Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin that a particular prisoner had refused to confess. Stalin considered the problem, then asked the commissar how much the state weighed, the state with all its buildings and factories and machines, the army with all its tanks and trucks, the navy with all its ships, the air force with all its planes. And then Stalin said, dear God, he said, Do you really think this prisoner can withstand the weight of the state?”
“Did you feel the weight of the state? Were you and your husband jailed?”
Zuzana Slanska had become so agitated that she began swallowing smoke and brandy in the same gulp. “Certainly we felt the weight of the state. Certainly we were jailed, some months at the same time and once even in the same prison, some months at different times so that we passed each other like ships in the night. I discovered that when you left prison you took the stench of it with you in your nostrils; it took months, years to get rid of it. Oh, once my husband returned from prison so beat up that I didn’t recognize him through the spy hole in the door and called the police to save me from a lunatic, and they came and looked at his identity card and told me it was safe to let him in, the lunatic in question was my husband. Does it happen in America, Mr. Odum, that the police must assure you it is safe to let your husband pass the door of your apartment? And then one day my husband was arrested for treating the broken ankle of a youth who turned out to be an anticommunist dissident hiding from the police. The journalists from America covering the trial pointed out in their stories that the same thing had happened to the American doctor who treated the broken ankle of A. Lincoln’s assassin.”
From some murky past from some murky legend? the story of the Prague trial surfaced in Martin’s memory. “You’re the wife of Pavel Slansky!”
“You recognize the name! You remember the trial!”
“Everyone who followed events in Eastern Europe was familiar with the name Pavel Slansky,” Martin said. “The Jewish doctor who was arrested for setting the broken ankle of a dissident; who at his trial pleaded innocent to that particular charge, but used the occasion to plead guilty to wanting to reform communism, explaining in excruciating detail why it needed reforming to survive. He was the forerunner of the reformers who came after him: Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, eventually Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.”