Legends (7 page)

Martin stood on the stoop for a moment, feigning confusion as he surveyed the street in either direction. Then he doubled back the way he’d come and made his way along President Street to the flagstones that led to the side entrance with the light over it. He was about to knock on the “No Peddlers” sign when the door was pulled open. Stella, wearing tight jeans with a man’s shirt tucked into them, stood inside, squinting up at him. The same three top buttons of her shirt were unbuttoned, revealing the same triangle of pale chest. Strangely, Martin found her more attractive than he remembered. He noticed her hands for the first time; the nails were neither painted nor bitten, the fingers themselves were incredibly long and extremely graceful. Even her chipped front tooth, which had struck him as downright ugly when they met the day before, seemed like an asset.

“Well, if it isn’t the barefoot gumshoe, Martin Odum, Private Eye,” Stella said with a mocking grin. She let him in and slipped his valise under a chair. “In that raincoat,” she said, taking it from him and hanging it on a vestibule hook, “you look like a foreign correspondent from a foreign country. I saw you limp past ten minutes ago,” she announced as she led him up a flight of stairs and into a windowless walk-in closet. “I concluded that your leg must be hurting. I concluded also that you’re paranoid someone might be following you.

I’ll bet you didn’t call me from home I’ll bet you called from a public phone.”

Martin grinned. “There’s a booth on Lincoln and Schenectady that smells like a can of turpentine.”

A booming voice behind Martin exclaimed, “My dear Stella, when will you learn that some paranoids have real enemies. I was watching from an upstairs window when he limped down President Street. Our visitor has the haunted look of someone who would circle the block twice before visiting his mother.”

Martin spun around to confront the corpulent figure wrapped in a terrycloth robe and crammed into a battery-powered wheelchair. Scratching noisily at an unshaven cheek with the nicotine-stained fingers of one hand, working a small joystick with the other, the man piloted himself into the closet, elbowed the door closed behind him and backed up until his back was against the wall. The naked electric bulb, dangling from the ceiling, illuminated his sallow face. Studying it, Martin experienced a twinge of recognition: in one of his incarnations he’d come across a photograph of this man in a counterintelligence scrapbook. But when? And under what circumstances?

“Mr. Martin Odum and me,” the man growled in the grating voice of a chain-smoker, “are birds of a feather. Tradecraft is our Kabala.” He scraped a kitchen match against the wall and sucked a foul smelling cigarette into life. “Which is how come I meet you in this safe room,” he plunged on, taking in with a sweep of his arm the shelves filled with household supplies, the mops and brooms and the vacuum cleaner, the piles of old newspapers waiting to be recycled. “Both of us know there are organizations that can eavesdrop on conversations over the land lines, it does not matter if the phones are on their hooks.”

Stella made a formal introduction. “Mr. Odum, this is my father, Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner.”

Kastner removed a pearl-handled Tula-Tokarev from the pocket of his terrycloth robe and set the handgun down on a shelf. Martin, who understood the value of gestures, accepted Kastner’s decision to disarm with a nod.

All the tradecraft talk had tripped a memory. Suddenly Martin recalled which counterintelligence scrapbook he’d been studying when he came across the face of Stella’s father: it was the one filled with mug shots of Soviet defectors. “Your daughter told me you were Russian,” Martin said lazily. “She didn’t say you were KGB.”

Kastner, nodding excitedly, gestured toward a plastic kitchen stool and Martin scraped it over and settled onto it. Stella leaned back against a folded stepladder, half sitting on one of its steps. “You are a quick wit, Mr. Martin Odum,” Kastner conceded, his bushy brows dancing over his heavy lidded eyes. “My body has slowed down but my brain is still functioning correctly, which is how come I am still cashing my annuity checks. It goes without saying but I will anyhow say it: I checked you out before I sent Stella over to test the temperature of the water.”

“There aren’t that many people in the neighborhood you could have checked me out with,” Martin observed, curious to identify Kastner’s sources.

“Your name was suggested to me by someone in Washington, who assured me you were overqualified for any job I might propose. To be on the safe side, I made discreet inquiries I talked with a Russian in Little Odessa whose ex-wife stole his Rottweiler when he missed some alimony payments. The person in question compared you to a long distance runner. He told me once you started something you finished it.”

Martin put two and two together. “Oskar Kastner can’t be your real name,” he said, thinking out loud. “A KGB defector living in Brooklyn under an assumed name there will surely be an elaborate cover story to go with the pseudonym means that you, like the other Soviet defectors, must be in the FBI’s witness protection program. According to your daughter, you came here in 1988, which means the CIA has long since wrung you dry and probably doesn’t return your calls if you make any. Which suggests that your friend in Washington who gave you my name is your FBI handler.”

So that was how Crystal Quest had gotten wind of Stella’s visit to the pool parlor! Someone in the FBI had heard that an ex-CIA type was playing detective in Crown Heights and passed Martin’s name on to Kastner. The FBI clerks who keep tabs on people in the protection program would have circulated a routine “contact” report when a former KGB officer announced his intention of employing a former CIA

officer even if the case in question had nothing to do with CIA operations. Somewhere in the labyrinthian corridors of Langley, a warning buzzer would have gone off; it had probably been the one wired to Quest’s brain.

Did this mean that Kastner’s missing son-in-law had some connection to past or present CIA operations? Martin decided it was an angle worth considering.

“He is pretty rapid for a long distance runner,” Kastner was telling his daughter. “My FBI friend said you were discharged from the CIA in 1994. He did not explain why, except to say it had nothing to do with stealing money or selling secrets or anything unpleasant like that.”

“I’m relieved you’re both on the same side,” Stella ventured from her perch on the ladder.

Martin batted a palm to disperse Kastner’s cigarette smoke. “Why didn’t you ask the FBI to try and find your missing son-in-law?”

“First thing I tried. They stretched some rules and searched the computer database for missing persons who had turned up dead. Unfortunately none of them fit Samat’s description.”

Martin smiled. ” Unfortunately!”

Kastner’s craggy features twisted into a scowl. “I speak American with an accent Stella never stops correcting me but I pick my words as if my life depended on their accuracy.”

“I can vouch for Kastner’s accent,” Stella said with a laugh.

“You call your father Kastner?”

“Sure. You’ve already figured out that’s not his real name it’s the name the FBI gave him when he came into the witness protection program. Calling my father Kastner is a running joke between us. Isn’t it, Kastner?”

“It reminds us who we’re not.”

Martin turned to Stella. “Meeting your father explains a lot.”

“Such as?” she demanded.

“It explains how you played along so quickly when I phoned this morning; you understood that I thought the phone might be tapped. You are your father’s daughter.”

“She was raised to be discreet when it comes to telephones,” Kastner agreed with evident pride. “She knows enough tradecraft to pay attention to people who are window shopping for objects they do not seem likely to buy. Women and fishing rods, for example. Or men and ladies undergarments.”

“You really didn’t need to go around the block twice,” Stella told Martin. “I promise you I wasn’t followed when I came to see you. I wasn’t followed on the way home either.”

“That being the case, how come the folks I used to work for are trying to discourage me from getting involved with missing husbands?”

Kastner manipulated the joystick; the wheelchair jerked toward Martin. “How do you know they know?” he asked quietly.

“A woman named Fred Astaire whispered in my ear.”

Kastner said, “I can see from the look in your eyes that you do not consider this Fred Astaire person to be a friend.”

“It takes a lot of energy to dislike someone. Occasionally I make the effort.”

Stella was following her own thoughts. “Maybe your pool parlor was bugged,” she suggested. “Maybe they hid a microphone in that Civil War rifle of yours.”

Martin shook his head. “If they had bugged my loft, they would have heard me refuse to take the case and not gone out of their way to lean on me.”

Tilting his large head, Kastner thought out loud: “The tip could have come from the FBI someone there might have routinely informed my CIA conducting officer if it looked as if you might become involved with me. But you probably figured that out already.”

Martin was mightily relieved to hear him reach this conclusion. It underscored his credibility.

Kastner stared at Martin, his jaw screwed up. “Stella told me you refused to take the case. Why did you modify your mind?”

Stella kept her eyes on Martin as she spoke to her father. “He didn’t modify his mind, Kastner. He modified his heart.”

“Respond to the question, if you please,” Kastner instructed his visitor.

“Let’s chalk it up to an unhealthy curiosity I’d like to know why the CIA doesn’t want this particular missing husband found. That and the fact that I don’t appreciate having an unpleasant woman who munches ice cubes tell me what I can or cannot do.”

“I like you,” Kastner burst out, his face breaking into a lopsided smile. “I like him,” he informed his daughter. “But he would not have gone very far in our Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. He is too much of a loner. We did not trust the loners. We only recruited people who were comfortable serving as cogs in the machine.”

“Which Directorate?” Martin asked.

The bluntness of Martin’s question made Stella wince; in her experience, people talking about intelligence matters usually beat around the bush. “In the USA, Kastner,” she told her father, who was visibly flustered, “they call this talking turkey.”

Kastner cleared his throat. “The Sixth Chief Directorate,” he said, adapting to the situation. “I was the second deputy to the man who ran the Directorate.”

“Uh-huh.”

The Russian looked at his daughter. “What does it mean, uh-huh?”

“It means he is familiar with the Sixth Chief Directorate, Kastner.”

In fact, Martin had more than a passing acquaintance with this particular Directorate. At one point in the late eighties, Lincoln Dittmann had recruited a KGB officer in Istanbul. Lincoln had made his pitch when he heard on the grapevine that the officers younger brother had been arrested for being out of step during a military drill; the instructor had acused him of sabotaging the parade to discredit the glorious Red Army. Lincoln had arranged to smuggle the disenchanted KGB officer and his family out of Istanbul in return for a roll of microfilm filled with Sixth Chief Directorate documents. The material provided the CIA with its first inside look into the operations of this up to then secret section. It had been carved out of the KGB Directorate structure back in the sixties to keep track of economic crimes. In 1987, when what the Soviets called “cooperatives” and the world referred to as “free market enterprises” were legalized by Comrade Gorbachev, the Sixth Chief Directorate shifted gears to keep track of these new businesses. As the economy, crippled by inflation and corruption at the most senior levels of government, began to stall, gangster capitalism thrived; cooperatives had to buy protection what the Russians called krysha or a roof from the hundreds of gangs sprouting in Moscow and other cities if they wanted to stay in business. When the Sixth Chief Directorate found it couldn’t crush the gangs and protect the emerging market economy, it simply stopped trying and joined in the free-for-all looting of the country. Martin remembered Stella’s saying that her father had immigrated to America in 1988. If he had been getting rich on the looting, he would have stayed and skimmed off his share. Which meant he was one of those diehard socialists who blamed Gorbachev and his “restructuring” for wrecking seventy years of Soviet communism. In short, Kastner was probably the rarest of birds, an ardent, if disheartened, Marxist condemned to live out his days in capitalist America.

“You are thinking so hard, smoke is emerging from your ears,” Kastner said with a laugh. “What conclusion have you reached?”

“I like you, too,” Martin declared. “I like your father,” he told Stella. “Fact is, he wouldn’t have lasted long in the CIA. He is far too idealistic for a shop that prides itself on the virtuosity of its pragmatists. Unlike your father, Americans aren’t interested in constructing a Utopia, for the simple reason they believe they’re living in one.”

Stella seemed stunned. “I like that you like Kastner, and for the right reasons,” she said softly.

Kastner, his nerves frayed, swiveled his wheelchair to one side and then the other. “It remains for us to put our heads together and figure out why the lady with the pseudonym Fred Astaire does not want my son-in-law, Samat, to be discovered.”

Martin permitted a rare half-smile onto his lips. “To do that I’m | going to have to discover Samat.”

Stella disappeared to brew up some tea and hurried back minutes later carrying a tray with a jar of jam and three steaming cups on it. She found her father and Martin, their knees almost touching, deep in conversation. Martin was smoking one of his wafer-thin Beedies. Her father had started another cigarette but held it at arm’s length so the smoke wouldn’t obscure Martin.

“… somehow managed to falsify the records so the Party would not know his mother was Jewish,” Kastner was explaining. “His father was an Armenian doctor and a member of the Party at one point he was accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia, where he died. The post-Stalinist program to rehabilitate people falsely accused of crimes counted in Samat’s favor when he applied to the Forestry Institute; the state had killed his father so it felt it had to compensate the son.”