Legends (49 page)

“Who’s he hiding from?”

“For starters, Chechen gangsters bent on revenge for the killing of one of their leaders known as the Ottoman. Then there’s your sister, also his uncle Akim, who claims Samat siphoned off a hundred and thirty million dollars from holding companies he controlled. For some reason I can’t figure out, the CIA seems to be very interested in him, too.”

“Where do I come in?”

“When you described Samat to me in the pool parlor “

“That seems so long ago it must have been during a previous incarnation.”

“You’re talking to a world-class expert on previous incarnations.

When you described him, you said his eyes were seaweed-green and utterly devoid of emotion. You told me if you could see his eyes, you would be able to pick him out of a crowd.” Martin lowered his voice. “I don’t mean to push you past where you’re ready to go how come you know his eyes so well?”

Stella turned away. After a moment she said, “You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t imagine the answer.”

“You saw his seaweed-green eyes up close when you slept with him.”

Stella groaned. “The night of the wedding, he came to my room in the early hours of the morning. He slipped under the covers. He was naked. He warned me not to make a commotion he said it would only hurt my sister when he told her I’d … I’d invited him.” Stella looked into Martin’s eyes. “I’d know his eyes anywhere because I memorized them when he fucked me in the room next to my sister’s bedroom on the night of her marriage to this monster of a man. I was originally planning to stay in Kiryat Arba for three weeks, but I left after ten days. He came into my bed every night I was there …”

“And when you returned two years later?”

“I took him aside the first day and told him I’d kill him if he came into my bed again.”

“How did he react?”

“He only laughed. At night he would turn the doorknob to torture me, but he didn’t come into the room. Martin, you’ve got to tell me the truth does this change anything between us?”

He shook his head no.

Stella permitted the ghost of a smile to settle softly onto her lips again.

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 pr icier 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 on 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?”

11 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 loan sharks 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.

“Amazing 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 bib bed 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.