Legends (3 page)

“What happened to your foot?” she asked.

“Pinched nerve. Numbness.”

“In your line of work, isn’t a limp a handicap?”

“The opposite is true. No one in his right mind would suspect someone with a limp of following him. It’s too obvious.”

“Still, you ought to have it looked at.”

“I’ve been seeing a Hasidic acupuncturist and a Haitian herbalist, but I don’t tell one about the other.”

“Have they helped you?”

“Uh-huh. One of them has there’s less numbness now but I’m not sure which.”

The ghost of a smile materialized on her lips. “You seem to have a knack for complicating simple things.”

Martin, with a cold politeness that masked how close he was to losing interest, said, “In my book that beats simplifying complicated things.”

Depositing her satchel on the floor, the woman slipped out of her raincoat and carefully folded it over the banister. She was wearing running sneakers, tailored trousers with pleats at the waist and a man’s shirt that buttoned from left to right. Martin saw that the three top buttons were open, revealing a triangle of pale skin on her chest. There was no sign of an undergarment. The observation made him suck in his cheeks; it occurred to him that the bee stings might be having some effect after all.

The woman wheeled away from Martin and wandered into the pool parlor, her eyes taking in the faded green felt on the two old tables, the moving company cartons sealed with masking tape piled in a corner next to the rowing machine, the overhead fan turning with such infinite slowness that it seemed to impart its lethargic rhythm to the space it was ventilating. This was obviously a realm where time slowed down. “You don’t look like someone who smokes cigars,” she ventured when she spotted the mahogany humidor with the built in thermometer on the pool table that served as a desk.

“I don’t. It’s for fuses.”

“Fuses as in electricity?”

“Fuses as in bombs.”

She opened the lid. “These look like paper shotgun cartridges.”

“Fuses, paper cartridges need to be kept dry.”

She threw him an anxious look and went on with her inspection. “You’re not crawling in creature comforts,” she noted, her words drifting back over her shoulder as she took a turn around the wide floorboards.

Martin thought of all the safe houses he had lived in, furnished in ancient Danish modern; he suspected the CIA must have bought can openers and juice makers and toilet bowl brushes by the thousands because they were the same in every safe house. And because they were safe houses, none of them had been perfectly safe. “It’s a mistake to possess comfortable things,” he said now. “Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don’t settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.” Flashing a wrinkled smile, he added, “This is especially true for those of us who limp.”

Looking through the open door into the back room, the woman caught a glimpse of crumpled newspapers around the Army cot. “What’s with all the newspapers on the floor?” she asked.

Hearing her speak, Martin was reminded how satisfyingly musical an ordinary human voice could be. “I picked up that little trick from The Maltese Falcon fellow named Thursby kept newspapers around his bed so no one could sneak up on him when he slept.” His patience was wearing thin. “I learned everything I know about being a detective from Humphrey Bogart.”

The woman came full circle and stopped in front of Martin; she studied his face but couldn’t tell if he was putting her on. She was having second thoughts about hiring someone who had learned the detective business from Hollywood movies. “Is it true detectives were called gumshoes?” she said, eyeing his bare feet. She backed up to the pool table covered with muzzle-loading firearms and powder horns and Union medals pinned to a crimson cushion, trying to figure out what fiction she could come up with that would get her out of there without hurting his feelings. At a loss for words, she absently ran her fingers along the brass telescopic sight on an antique rifle. “My father collects guns from the Great Patriotic War,” she remarked.

“Uh-huh. That makes your father Russian. In America we call it World War Two. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch the weapons.” He added, “That one’s an English Whitworth. It was the rifle of choice of Confederate sharpshooters. The paper cartridges in the humidor are for the Whitworth. During the Civil War Whitworth cartridges were expensive, but a skilled sniper could hit anything he could see with the weapon.”

“You some sort of Civil War buffi” she asked.

“My alter ego is,” he said. “Look, we’ve made enough small talk. Bite the bullet, lady. You must have a name.”

Her left palm drifted up to cover the triangle of skin on her chest. “I’m Estelle Kastner,” she announced. “The precious few friends I have call me Stella.”

” Who are you?” Martin persisted, quarrying for deeper layers of identity than a name.

The question startled her; there was clearly more to him than met the eye, which raised the prospect that he might be able to help her after all. “Listen, Martin Odum, there are no shortcuts. You want to find out who I am, you’re going to have to put in time.”

Martin settled back against the banister. “What is it you hope I can do for you?”

“I hope you can find my sister’s husband, who’s gone A.W.O.L. from his marriage.”

“Why don’t you try the police? They have a missing person’s bureau that specializes in this sort of thing.”

“Because the police in question are in Israel. And they have more pressing things to do than hunt for missing husbands.”

“If your sister’s husband went missing in Israel, why are you looking for him in America?”

“We think that’s one of the places he might have headed for when he left Israel.”

“We?”

“My father, the Russian who calls World War Two the Great Patriotic War.”

“What are the other places?”

“My sister’s husband had business associates in Moscow and Uzbekistan. He seems to have been involved in some kind of project in Prague. He had stationary with a London letterhead.”

“Start at the start,” Martin ordered.

Stella Kastner hiked herself up on the edge of the pool table that Martin used as a desk. “Here’s the story,” she said, crossing her legs at the ankles, toying with the lowest unbuttoned button on her shirt. “My half-sister, Elena, she’s my father’s daughter by his first wife, turned religious and joined the Lubavitch sect here in Crown Heights soon after we immigrated to America, which was in 1988. Several years ago the rabbi came to my father and proposed an arranged marriage with a Russian Lubavitcher who wanted to immigrate to Israel. He didn’t speak Hebrew and was looking for an observant wife who spoke Russian. My father had mixed feelings about Elena leaving Brooklyn, but it was my sister’s dream to live in Israel and she talked him into giving his consent. For reasons that are too complicated to go into, my father wasn’t free to travel so it was me who accompanied Elena when she flew to Israel. We took a sharoof she noticed Martin’s frown of confusion “that’s a communal taxi, we took it to the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba on the West Bank next to Hebron. Elena, who changed her name to Ya’ara when she set foot in Israel, was married an hour and a quarter after the plane landed by the rabbi there, who had emigrated from Crown Heights ten years before.”

“Tell me about this Russian your sister married sight unseen.”

“His name was Samat Ugor-Zhilov. He was neither tall nor short but somewhere between the two, and thin despite the fact that he asked for seconds at mealtime and snacked between meals. It must have been his metabolism. He was the high strung type, always on the move. His face looked as if it had been caught in a vise it was long and thin and mournful he always managed to look as if he were grieving over the death of a close relative. The pupils of his eyes were seaweed-green, the eyes themselves were utterly devoid of emotion cold and calculating would be the words I’d use to describe them. He dressed in expensive Italian suits and wore shirts with his initials embroidered on the pocket. I never saw him wearing a tie, not even at his own wedding.”

“You would recognize him if you saw him again?”

“That’s a strange question. He could cover his head like an Arab as long as I could see his eyes, I could pick him out of a crowd.”

“What did he do by way of work?”

“If you mean work in the ordinary sense of the term, nothing. He’d bought a new split-level house on the edge of Kiryat Arba for cash, or so the rabbi whispered in my ear as we were walking to the synagogue for the wedding ceremony. He owned a brand new Japanese Honda and paid for everything, at least in front of me, with cash. I stayed in Kiryat Arba for ten days and I came back again two years later for ten days, but I never saw him go to the synagogue to study Torah, or to an office like some of the other men in the settlement. There were two telephones and a fax machine in the house and it seemed as if one of them was always ringing. Some days he’d lock himself in the upstairs bedroom and talk on the phone for hours at a stretch. The few times he talked on the phone in front of me he switched to Armenian.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh what?”

“Sounds like one of those new Russian capitalists you read about in the newspapers. Did your sister have children?”

Stella shook her head. “No. To tell you the awful truth, I’m not positive they ever consummated the marriage.” She slid to the floor and went over to the window to stare out at the street. “The fact is I don’t fault him for leaving her. I don’t think Elena I never got used to calling her Ya’ara has the vaguest idea how to please a man. Samat probably ran off with a bleached blonde who gave him more pleasure in bed.”

Martin, listening listlessly, perked up. “You make the same mistake most women make. If he ran off with another woman, it’s because he was able to give her more pleasure in bed.”

Stella turned back to gaze at Martin. Her eyes tightened into a narrower squint. “You don’t talk like a detective.”

“Sure I do. It’s the kind of thing Bogart would have said to convince a client that under the hard boiled exterior resided a sensitive soul.”

“If that’s what you’re trying to do, it’s working.”

“I have a question: Why doesn’t your sister get the local rabbi to testify that her husband ran out on her and divorce him in absentia?”

“That’s the problem,” Stella said. “In Israel a religious woman needs to have a divorce handed down by a religious court before she can go on with her life. The divorce is called a get. Without a get, a Jewish woman remains an agunah, which means a chained woman, unable to remarry under Jewish law; even if she remarries under civil law her children will still be considered bastards. And the only way a woman can obtain a get is for the husband to show up in front of the rabbis of a religious court and agree to the divorce. There’s no other way, at least not for religious people. There are dozens of Hasidic husbands who disappear each year to punish their wives they go off to America or Europe. Sometimes they live under assumed names. Go find them if you can! Under Jewish law the husband is permitted to live with a woman who’s not his wife, but the wife doesn’t have the same right. She can’t marry again, she can’t live with a man, she can’t have children.”

“Now I’m beginning to see why you need the services of a detective. How long ago did this Samat character skip out on your sister?”

“It’ll be two months next weekend.”

“And its only now that you’re trying to hire a detective?”

“We didn’t know for sure he wasn’t coming back until he didn’t come back. Then we wasted time trying the hospitals, the morgues, the American and Russian embassies in Israel, the local police in Kiryat Arba, the national police in Tel Aviv. We even ran an ad in the newspaper offering a reward for information.” She tossed a shoulder. “I’m afraid we don’t have much experience tracking down missing persons.”

“You said earlier that your father and you thought Samat might head for America. What made you decide that?”

“It’s the phone calls. I caught a glimpse once of his monthly phone bill it was several thousand shekels, which is big enough to put a dent in a normal bank account. I noticed that some of the calls went to the same number in Brooklyn. I recognized the country and area code 1 for America, 718 for Brooklyn because it’s the same as ours on President Street.”

“You didn’t by any chance copy down the number?”

She shook her head in despair. “It didn’t occur to me …”

“Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t know this Samat character was going to run out on your sister.” He saw her look quickly away. “Or did you?”

“I never thought the marriage would last. I didn’t see him burying himself in Kiryat Arba for the rest of his life. He was too involved in the world, too dynamic, too attractive “

“You found him attractive?”

“I didn’t say I found him attractive,” she said defensively. “I could see how he might appeal to certain women. But not my sister. She’d never been naked in front of a man in her life. As far as I know she’d never seen a naked man. Even when she saw a fully clothed man she averted her eyes. When Samat looked at a woman he stared straight into her eyes without blinking; he undressed her. He claimed to be a religious Jew but I think now it may have been some kind of cover, a way of getting into Israel, of disappearing into the world of the Hasidim. I never saw him lay tefillin, I never saw him go to the synagogue, I never saw him pray the way religious Jews do four times a day. He didn’t kiss the mezuzah when he came into the house the way my sister did. Elena and Samat lived in different worlds.”

“You have photographs of him?”

“When he disappeared, my sister’s photo album disappeared with him. I have one photo I took the day they were married I sent it to my father, who framed it and hung it over the mantle.” Retrieving her satchel, she pulled a brown envelope from it and carefully extracted a black and white photograph. She stared at it for a moment, the ghost of an anguished smile deforming her lips, then offered it to Martin.