Legends (48 page)

“What on earth do you mean by appropriate?”

“Kafka wrote stories about anguished individuals struggling to survive a nightmarish world, which was more or less how the principal of this new legend would see himself.”

“You’ve obviously read Kafka,” Maggie Poole said.

“He could have read into Kafka at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,” someone noted.

“He could have worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.”

“Through our contacts in Warsaw, we could land him a job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow. From there he ought to be able to make contact with the DDO target without attracting too much attention to himself.”

“Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out when he’s in Moscow.”

“That’s Crystal Quest’s bailiwick,” Lincoln remarked.

1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS TO INSPECT THE SIBERIAN NIGHT MOTH

THE PHONE ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE HAD RUNG SO MANY times, Martin had given up counting. He decided to let it ring all evening, all night, all the next day if necessary. She had to return home sometime. A woman carrying a sleeping baby on her hip rapped a coin against the glass door of the booth and angrily held up her wrist so that Martin could see the watch on it. Muttering “Find another booth I bought this one,” he turned his back on her. Shaking her head at how insufferable certain inhabitants of the borough had become, the woman stalked off. In Martin’s ear the phone continued to ring with such regularity that he ceased to be conscious of the sound. His thoughts wandered he played back what he could remember of the previous phone calls. To his surprise, he was able to recreate her voice in his brain as if he were a skillful ventriloquist. He could hear her saying, When the answers are elusive you have to learn to live with the questions.

It dawned on him that the phone was no longer ringing on the other end of the line. Another human being was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.

“Stella?”

“Martin, is that you?” a voice remarkably like Stellas demanded.

Martin was surprised when he realized how eager he was to hear that voice; to talk to the one person on earth who was not put off because he wasn’t sure who he was, who seemed ready to live with whatever version of himself he offered up. Suddenly he felt the dead bird stirring in him: He ached to see the night moth tattooed under her breast.

“It’s me, Stella. It’s Martin.”

“Jesus, Martin. Wow. I can’t believe it.”

“I’ve been ringing for hours. Where were you?”

“I met some Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket on Kingston Avenue. They were new immigrants, practically off the boat. I was entertaining them with jokes I used to tell in Moscow when I worked for subsection Marx. You want to hear a great one I just remembered?”

“Uh-huh.” Anything to keep her talking.

She giggled at the punch line before she told the joke. “Okay,” she said, collecting herself. “Three men find themselves in a cell in the Lubyanka prison. After awhile the first prisoner asks the second, “What are you here for?” And the second prisoner says, “I was against Popov. What about you?” And the first prisoner says, “I was for Popov.” The two turn to the third prisoner and ask, “Why were you arrested?” And he answers, “I’m Popov.””

She became exasperated when Martin didn’t laugh. “When I delivered the punch line at the Moscow Writers Union, people would roll on the floor. Someone in subsection Marx tracked the joke it spread across Moscow in three days and reached Vladivostok in a week and a half. The Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket actually applauded. And you don’t get it?”

“I get it, Stella. It’s not funny. It’s pathetic. When your joke spread across Russia, people weren’t laughing. They were crying.”

Stella thought about that. “There may be something to what you say. Hey, where are you calling from this time? Murmansk on the Barents Sea? Irkutsk on Lake Baikal?”

“Listen up, Stella. Do you remember the first time I ever phoned you?

“How could I forget. You called to tell me you didn’t have a change of mind, you had a change of heart. You were phoning from “

He cut her off. “I was calling from a booth that reeked of turpentine.”

He could hear her catch her breath. “On the corner of “

He interrupted her again. “Could you find the booth if your life depended on it?”

She said, very calmly, “My life does depend on it.”

“Do me a favor and bring the autopsy report on your father that the FBI guy sent you.”

“Anything else?”

“Uh-huh. That time when I met your father, he removed a pearl-handled souvenir from the pocket of his robe and put it on a shelf where I could see it. I’d like to get my hands on that object, if it’s possible.”

“Anything else?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’d like to inspect the night moth.”

“No problem,” she said. “It goes where I go.”

They were nursing mugs of lukewarm coffee in a booth at the back of the twenty-four-hour diner on Kingston Avenue, two stores down from Throckmorton’s Minimarket. Stella kept looking up at Martin; phrases formed in her mind only to become stuck on the tip of her tongue. When she had turned up at the phone booth on the corner of Lincoln and Schenectady, they had hugged awkwardly for a moment. The faint aroma of rose petals seeped from under the collar on the back of her neck. Stella had said something about how they really ought to kiss, and they did, but the kiss was self-conscious and quick, and a disappointment to both of them. At a loss for words, he’d remarked that he’d never seen her in anything but pants. She said she’d worn the tight knee-length black skirt to disguise herself as a woman. He’d actually managed a smile and said that the deception could have fooled him. He asked her if she had taken precautions to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She explained how she had strolled over to an ice cream parlor on Rogers Avenue crammed with teenagers playing electronic pinball machines, then ducked out a back door into an alleyway and made her way through empty side streets to Schenectady and the phone booth. Nodding, he had taken her by the arm and steered her wordlessly in the direction of the all-night diner on Kingston. Sitting across from her now, he noticed the new front tooth; it was whiter than the rest of her teeth and hard to miss. Her hair was pulled back and twined into a braid that plunged out of sight behind her shoulder blades. He recognized the small wrinkles fanning out from the corners of her eyes, which were fixed in a faint squint, as if she were trying to peer into him. The three top buttons of her man’s shirt were open, the triangle of pale skin shimmering on her chest.

Martin cleared his throat. “You threatened to show me the tattoo the next time we met.”

“Here? Now?”

“Why not?”

Stella looked around. There were four Chinese women in a booth across the diner playing mahjongg, and a young man and a girl two booths away staring so intently into each other’s eyes Stella doubted they would be distracted by anything less than an earthquake. She took a deep breath to work up her nerve and undid three more buttons on her shirt and pulled the fabric away from her right breast. Visions invaded Martin’s brain: a neon light sizzling over a bar on the Beirut waterfront, a room upstairs with the torn painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Acre, the night moth tattooed under the right breast of the Alawite prostitute who went by the name of Djamillah. “You want the God honest truth?” he whispered. “Your Siberian night moth takes my breath away.”

The ghost of a smile materialized on Stella’s lips. “That’s what it’s supposed to do. The Jamaican tattoo artist on Empire Boulevard said I could have my money back if it didn’t bowl you over. Maybe now one thing will lead to another.”

He reached for her hand and she folded her other hand on top of his, and they both leaned across the table and kissed.

Settling back, Martin said, “Business first.”

“I like your formula,” Stella said, rebuttoning her shirt.

He looked surprised. “Why?”

“Reading between the lines, it puts pleasure on the agenda.”

A smile touched his eyes. “Did you bring the autopsy report?”

She pulled the report and the letter that had come with it from her leather satchel and unfolded them on the table. Martin skimmed the autopsy report first: .. . myocardial infarction… clot superimposed on plaque in coronary artery already constricted by cholesterol buildup… abrupt and severe drop in blood flow… irreparable trauma to a portion of the heart muscle… death would have been almost instantaneous.

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh what?”

“The CIA doctor seems to be saying your father died a natural death.”

“As opposed to an unnatural death? As opposed to murder?”

Martin started reading the covering letter the FBI had sent with the autopsy report. No trace of forced entry… even if there had been, Mr. Kastner had a charged Tula-Tokarev within arm’s reach… no evidence of a struggle… unfortunately not unusual for people confined, like Mr. Kastner was, to a wheelchair to experience blood clots originating in a leg that work their way up to the coronary arteries… minuscule break in the skin near a shoulder blade compatible with an insect bite… Feel free to call me on my unlisted number if you have any questions. Martin looked up. “Did you father go out often?”

“Kastner never left the house. He didn’t even go into the garden behind the house. He spent his time cleaning and oiling his collection of guns.”

“If he didn’t go out, how did he get bitten by an insect?”

“You aren’t convinced by the autopsy report?”

Martin glanced at the signature at the bottom of the letter, then stiffened.

Stella asked, “What’s not right?”

“I used to know a Felix Klick who worked for the FBI.”

“There was another agent in charge of the Witness Protection Program when Kastner and I and Elena came over in 1988. We met him several times when we were living at the CIA safehouse in Tyson’s Corner outside of Washington. The agent retired in 1995 he came to President Street to introduce the person who was taking his place. That’s how we met Mr. Klick.”

“Short? Stumpy? With a low center of gravity that makes him look like an NFL linesman? Nice, open face?”

“That’s the one. Do you know him?”

“Our paths crossed several times when I worked for the CIA. I knew him as a counterterrorism specialist, but they probably booted him upstairs at the end of his career. The Witness Protection people are usually running in place, waiting for retirement to catch up with them.” Martin thought of something. “When I met your father, he mentioned that he’d gotten my name from someone in Washington. Was that someone Felix Klick?”

Stella could see that the question was bothering Martin. She considered carefully before answering. “Kastner called the unlisted number in Washington we’d been given in case we needed anything. Now that you mention it, it was Mr. Klick who said there was a good detective living not far from us. He recommended you, but he told Kastner not to tell you where he’d gotten your name.”

Martin seemed to be focusing on horizons that Stella couldn’t see. “So it was no accident that I wound up walking back the cat on Samat Ugor-Zhilov.”

Stella said, “I brought the souvenir with the pearl handle.” She opened the satchel and tilted it so Martin could see her father’s Tula-Tokarev. “It’s an antique, but it still shoots. It was Kastner’s favorite handgun. From time to time he went down to the basement and fired it into a carton filled with roof insulation, then he’d recover the bullet and examine it under a low-powered microscope. I brought bullets for it, too.”

Stella touched her lips to the coffee but found it had grown cold. Martin signaled for refills. The waiter, a teenage boy with long sideburns and a silver stud in the side of a nostril, brought two steaming mugs of coffee and took away the old ones. Stella said, “What about Samat?”

“I think I know how to locate him.” Quit. I’m sorry?

“Quit. Forget Samat. Concentrate on locating me.”

“What about your father?”

“What’s Kastner have to do with your deciding to quit?”

“He hired me. He’s dead, which means he can’t un hire me.” Martin reached again for her wrist but she snatched it back. “I haven’t come all this way to quit now,” he insisted.

“You’re crazy.” She noticed the expression on his face. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You’re not crazy crazy. You are imperfectly sane. Admit it, your behavior is sometimes borderline. In your shoes anyone else would shrug and get on with his life.”

“You mean his lives.”

Martin reached again for her wrist. This time she didn’t pull away. He fingered her watch and began absently winding the stem. “Samat’s in America,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

He produced the picture postcard and told her how he had tracked Samat from Israel to London to Prague to Vozrozhdemye Island in the Aral Sea to the Lithuanian village of Zuzovka, and finally to the village of Prigorodnaia not far from Moscow where Samat’s mother, Kristyna, lived in the empty dacha once owned by the most hated man in Russia, Lavrenti Beria. “She told me she was a raving lunatic when she needed to be,” Martin said. “She told me she wrapped herself in lunacy the way a peasant pulls a sheepskin coat over his shoulders in winter.”

“Sounds to me like a survival strategy.” Stella examined the photograph on the postcard the men and boys attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls wearing ankle-length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin. She turned it over and translated the message. “Mama dearest, I am alive and well in America the Beautiful… Your devoted S.” She noticed the printed caption had been scraped off. “Where on God’s green earth is fast New York?” she demanded, squinting at the post office cancellation mark across the stamp.

“I’ve done my homework. The people in the photograph are Amish. Belfast, New York is the rough center of the Amish community that lives upstate New York, and the only town upstate that ends in fast. It makes tradecraft sense. All the men have long beards. Instead of shaving off his beard, which is what the Russian revolutionaries used to do when they wanted to disappear, Samat would keep his and dress like the Amish and melt into the madding crowd.”