Legends (17 page)

“Aren’t you going to pray for your father?” Martin whispered to Stella.

“I only pray for the living,” she retorted fiercely.

When the prayer ended the rabbi excused himself to organize the Sabbath pilgrimage to the Cave of Machpela, and Martin got his first opportunity to talk to Stellas sister. “I’m sorry about your father,” he began.

She accepted this with a shy closing of her lids. “I was not expecting him to die, and certainly not of a heart attack. He had the heart of a lion. After all he had been through ” She shrugged weakly.

“Your sister has hired me to find Samat so that you can get a religious divorce.”

Ya’ara turned on Stella. “What good will a divorce do me?”

“It is a matter of pride,” Stella insisted. “You can’t let him get away with this.”

Martin steered the conversation back to matters of tradecraft. “Do you have anything of his a book he once read, a telephone he once used, a bottle of alcohol he once poured a drink from, a toothbrush even? Anything at all?”

Ya’ara shook her head. “There was stationery with a London letterhead but it disappeared and I don’t remember the address on it. Samat filled a trunk with personal belongings and paid two boys to carry it down to the taxi when he left. He even took the photographs of our wedding. The only photograph left of him was the one Stella snapped after the ceremony and sent to our father.” At the mention of their father, tears trickled down her cheeks again. “How could Samat do this to a wife, I ask you?”

“Stella told me he was always talking on the phone,” Martin said. “Did he initiate the calls or did people call him?”

“Both.”

“So there must be phone records showing the numbers he dialed.”

Again she shook her head. “The rabbi asked the security office here to try and get the phone numbers. Someone even drove to Tel Aviv to interview the phone company. He reported back that the numbers were all on a magnetic tape that had been erased by error. There was no trace of the numbers he called.”

“What language did he use when he spoke on the phone?”

“English. Russian. Armenian sometimes.”

“Did you ever ask him what he did for a living?”

Once.

Stella said, “What did he say?”

“At first he didn’t answer. When I pressed him, he told me he ran a business selling Western-manufactured artificial limbs to people who had lost legs to Russian land mines in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kurdistan. He said he could have made a fortune but was selling them at cost.”

“And you believed him?” Stella asked.

“I had no reason not to.” Ya’ara’s eyes suddenly widened. “Someone once called when he wasn’t here and left a phone number for him to call back. I thought it might have something to do with these artificial limbs and wrote it down on the first thing that came to hand, which was the back of a recipe, and then copied it onto the pad next to the telephone. I tore off the page and gave it to Samat when he returned to the house that day and he went to the bedroom and dialed a number. I remember that the conversation was very agitated. At one point Samat was even yelling into the phone, and he kept switching from English to Russian and back to English again.”

“The recipe,” Stella said softly. “Do you still have it?”

Both Stella and Martin could see Ya’ara hesitate. “You would not be betraying your husband,” Martin said. “If and when we find him, we are only going to make sure you get the famous get so you can go on with your life.”

“Samat owes that much to you,” Stella said.

Sighing, moving as if her limbs were weighted down by gravity, Ya’ara pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen alcove and pulled a tin box from one of the wall cupboards. She carried it back to the living room, set it on the folding table, opened the lid and began thumbing through printed recipes that she had torn out of Elle magazine over the years. She pulled the one for apple strudel out of the box and turned it over. A phone number starting with the country code 44 and city code 171 was scrawled on the back in pencil. Martin produced a felt tipped pen and copied the number into a small notebook.

“Where is that?” Stella asked Martin.

“Forty-four is England, 171 is London,” he said. He turned back to Stella. “Did Samat ever leave Kiryat Arba?” he asked.

“Once, sometimes twice a week, he drove off by himself, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for several days.”

“Do you have any idea where he went?”

“The one time I asked him he told me it was not the business of a wife to keep track of a husband.”

Stella looked brightly at Martin. “We went with him once, Martin.” She smiled at her half sister. “Don’t you remember, Elena “

“My name is Ya’ara now,” Stellas sister reminded her coldly.

Stella was not put off. “It was when I came for the wedding,” she said excitedly. “I had to be at Ben-Gurion Airport at seven in the evening for my flight back to New York. Samat was going somewhere for lunch. He said if we didn’t mind killing time, he had to see someone on the coast and could drop me at the airport on the way back to Kiryat Arba.”

“I remember that,” Ya’ara said. “We made bologna sandwiches and packed them in a paper bag and took a plastic bottle of apple juice.” She sighed again. “That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she added.

Stella said to Martin, “He drove north from Tel Aviv along the expressway and got off at the exit marked “Caesarea.” There was a labyrinth of streets but he never hesitated, he seemed to know his way around very well. He dropped us on the edge of the sand dunes near some A-frame houses. We could see those giant chimneys down the coast that produced electricity.”

Ya ara’s face lit up for the first time in Martins presence; the smile almost made her look handsome. “I wore an enormous straw hat to protect my face from the sun,” she recalled. “We ate in the shade of a eucalyptus tree and then hunted for Roman coins in the sand.”

“And what did Samat do while you were scouring the dunes for Roman coins?” Martin asked.

The girls looked at each other. “He never told us. He picked us up at the A-frames at five-thirty and dropped me off at the airport at six-forty.”

“Uh-huh,” Martin said, his brows knitting as he began to fit the first blurred pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place.

Martin took a tiny address book (tradecraft ruled: Everyone in it was identified by nickname and phone numbers were masked in a simple cipher) from his pocket and used his AT&T card to call Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant (listed in the address book as “Glutamate”) under the pool parlor on Albany Avenue in Crown Heights. Given the time difference, Tsou would be presiding from the high stool behind the cash register, glowering at the waitress who had replaced Minh if she failed to push the more expensive dishes on the menu. “Peking duck hanging in window for two days,” he’d once informed Minh, his gold teeth glistening with saliva, his face a mask of earnestness (so she had gleefully recounted to Martin), “is aphlodisiac, good for elections.”

“Xing’s Mandalin,” a high pitched voice so distinct it could have been coming from the next room announced when the phone on the other end was picked up. “Filled up at lunch, same tonight. No flea table until lunch Sunday.”

“Don’t hang up,” Martin cried into the phone. “Tsou, it’s me, Martin.”

” Yin shi, from where you calling, huh?”

Martin knew that Fred would be keeping track of his whereabouts through Asher and the Israeli Shabak, so he figured he was not giving anything away if he told the truth.

“I’m in Israel.”

“Islael the Jewish kingdom or Islael the Jewish delicatessen on Kingston Avenue?” Tsou didn’t wait for an answer. “You know about Minh, huh?”

“That’s why I’m calling. Tell me what happened, Tsou.”

The story spurted out. “She goes up to check the hives the way you asked. She does not come back. Clients begin to fidget. No food in sight. I go out back and shout up “Minh.” She does not shout back. I climb file escape, find Minh laying on back, not moving, not conscious, clazy bees stinging life out of Minh’s face. Disgusting. Makes me want to vomit. Call police on loft phone, Matin, hope you do not mind, let them into loft when they ling bell, they put on face masks and chase bees with can of Laid found below sink, they take Minh away in ambulance, face bloated big like basketball. She dead before ambulance leach hospital, Matin. Minh’s death makes page two Daily News, big headline say “Deadly Bees Kill Clown Heights Woman.””

“What did the police say, Tsou?”

“Two detectives come for lunch next day, sons of bitches leave without paying check, I wave it in faces but they do not take hint. They ask about you and I tell them what I know, which is nothing. They tell me ASPCA in white clothing came to kill bees. They tell me hive exploded, which is what made bees clazy to attack Minh. Comes as news to me honey can explode.”

Through the window Martin could see the orange streaks of sunset in the sky and the rabbi assembling a group of settlers for the stroll down the road toward Hebron and the Cave of Machpela. “It comes as news to me, too,” he said very softly.

“What you say?” Tsou shouted.

“I said, honey doesn’t normally explode.”

“Huh. So. Detectives, they say Minh not even Minh’s name, she illegal immigrant from Taiwan named Chun-chiao. Business picked up when Daily News ran name Xing’s Mandolin on page two even though they spelled Xing “Zing.” I admit it, whole thing leave bad taste in my mouth. Velly upsetting.”

Martin assumed Tsou was referring to Minh’s death. “Yeah, very,” he agreed.

Tsou, however, seemed to be more concerned with Minh’s false identity than her death. “Cannot believe anyone anymore these days, huh, yin she. Minh not Minh. Maybe you not Matin.”

“Maybe the Daily News was right,” Martin said, “maybe your real name is Tsou Zing with a “Z.””

“Maybe,” Tsou agreed with a sour laugh. “Who can say?”

With Rabbi Ben Zion and Martin strolling along in the lead and the two Kastner sisters bringing up the rear, the group of thirty or so ultra nationalist orthodox settlers, the men sporting tzitzit and embroidered yarmulkes, the women in ankle-length skirts and long sleeved blouses and head scarves, made their way down the road toward the Cave of Machpela to greet the Sabbath at the holy site where the Patriarch Abraham was said to be buried. Two policemen wearing blue uniforms and blue baseball caps, along with half a dozen of the younger settlers, walked on either side of the group, rifles or Uzis slung over their shoulders.

The sun had disappeared behind the hills and the darkness was starting to blot out the twilight between the buildings. Instinctively, the murky dusk left Martin feeling queasy. Agents who worked the field liked daylight because they could see danger coming, and nighttime because they could hide from it; the penumbra between the two offered none of the advantages of either. The massive fortress-like structure built over the sacred cave loomed ahead like a ship adrift in a fog.

“What do the Palestinians here think of your pilgrimages to the shrine?” Martin asked the rabbi, all the while inspecting the spaces between the Palestinian houses off to the right for any telltale sign of activity. Martin tensed as a shard of light ricocheted off a roof; as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he realized it was nothing more than a lingering sliver of sunlight glinting off the solar heating panels atop a three-story building.

“The Palestinians,” the rabbi replied, waving toward the surrounding houses, “say we’re walking on their toes.” You are, aren’t your

The rabbi shrugged. “Look, it’s not as if we’re being unreasonable. Those of us who believe the Lord God gave this land to Abraham and his descendants for eternity are willing to let the Palestinians remain here as long as they accept that the land is ours.”

“What about the others?”

“They can emigrate.”

“That doesn’t leave them or you, for that matter much room for maneuver.”

“It’s easy for visitors to come here from the outside and criticize, Mr. Odum, and then fly back to the safety of their country, their city, their homes …”

“My home,” Martin ventured, “turns out to be less safe than I thought.” He made a mental note to get more details of the death of Stella’s father. He wondered if there had been an autopsy.

“You’re talking about crime in the streets. It’s nothing compared to what we have to put up with here.”

“I was talking about exploding honey “

“Come again I must be missing something.”

“Private joke.”

Eyeing potential danger areas, Martin spotted a spark in an alley way between two Palestinian homes to his right and uphill from the group of settlers walking toward the cave. Suddenly flames erupted and a blazing tire, thick black smoke billowing from it, started rolling downhill toward them. As the settlers scattered to get out of its path, the short hollow cough of a high-powered rifle resounded through the neighborhood and a spurt of dust materialized in the road immediately ahead of Martin. His old reflexes kicked in he figured out what was going on in an instant. The tire was the diversion; the rifle shot had come from the other side of the road, probably from the top of the cement cistern a hundred and fifty yards away on a small rise. The two policemen and the settlers armed with weapons had reacted instinctively and were charging uphill in the direction of the alleyway where the tire had come from. One of the policemen was shouting into a walkie-talkie. Back at Kiryat Arba, a siren, its pitch rising as it whimpered into life, began shrieking across the countryside.

“The shot came from behind us,” Martin shouted and he lunged for cover behind a low stone wall as the second shot nicked the dirt a yard beyond the spot where he’d been standing. Crouching behind the wall, massaging the muscles in his bad leg, Martin could see Stella and her sister, with her skirt hiked, running back up the hill toward the settlement, which was ablaze with searchlights sweeping the area. Moments later two Israeli jeeps and an open truck filled with soldiers came roaring down the road from the nearby army base. Leaping from their vehicles, the soldiers, bent low and running, charged the slopes on either side of the road. From behind the cistern came the staccato sound of automatic rifles being fired in short bursts. Martin suspected that the Palestinian rifleman assuming he was Palestinian had melted away and the soldiers were shooting at shadows.