Legends (8 page)

Martin nodded. “I seem to recall reading about your famous Forestry Institute that taught everything except forestry.”

Kastner set aside his cigarette in a saucer and stirred a spoonful of jam into one of the cups. Blowing noisily across it, he sipped at the scalding tea. “It was the secret institute for our space program,” he said. “In the seventies, it was the best place in the Soviet Union to study computer science. Samat went on to do advanced studies at the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. When he graduated near the top of his class, he was drafted into the KGB. Because of his computer skills, he was posted to the Sixth Chief Directorate.”

“You knew him personally?”

“He was assigned to several cases I worked on. He became an expert on money laundering techniques he knew everything there was to know about offshore banks and bearer-share business operations. In 1991, when Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev and took power, one of the things he did was break up our Committee for State Security into its component parts, at which point a great many KGB officers found themselves suddenly unemployed and scrambling to make a living. Samat was one of them.”

“You were in America by then. How do you know all this?”

“Your Central Intelligence Agency encouraged me to keep in touch with the Sixth Directorate. They wanted me to recruit agents in place.”

“Did you succeed?”

Kastner flashed a pained smile. Martin said, “I take back the question. So we’re up to where Samat, with the KGB closing down its shop, starts looking at the help wanted ads. What kind of job did he land?”

“He ended up working for one of the rising stars in the private sector, someone who had his own model of how to make the transition from socialism to market-oriented capitalism. His solution was gangster capitalism. He was one of the gangsters the Sixth Chief Directorate kept track of when I was there. Samat, with his knowledge of money laundering techniques, quickly worked his way up to become the organization’s financial wizard. He was the one who brought the shell game to Russia. You have seen the Negroes playing the shell game on street corners down on Rogers Avenue. They fold your ten-dollar bill until it is the size of a walnut and put it under a sea shell and move it around with two other shells. When they stop your ten-dollar bill has disappeared. Samat did the same thing but on a much larger scale.”

“And this is the Russian Lubavitch who wanted to marry your daughter and live in Israel?”

Kastner nodded heavily. “At one point the CIA asked me to try and recruit Samat. They arranged for me to talk with him on the telephone when he was in Geneva. I spoke of a secret account that could be his if he came over. I named a sum of money that would be deposited in this account. He laughed and replied that the sum of money they were suggesting was the loose change in his pocket. He told me the CIA could not afford to pay him a tenth of what he was earning. When Samat returned to Russia he made sure everyone knew the CIA had attempted to recruit him. There was even a satiric article published in Pravda describing the clumsy approach by a defector.”

“When did Samat get in touch with you about marrying your daughter?” Martin asked.

“It was not Samat who contacted Kastner,” Stella said. “Samat’s employer, who happened to be Samat’s uncle his father’s brother is the one who got in touch with Kastner.”

Martin looked from one to the other. “And who was Samat’s employer?”

Kastner cleared his throat. “It was Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one known as the Oligarkh.”

” The Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov who was on the cover of Time magazine in the early nineties?”

“There is only one Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,” Kastner remarked with some bitterness.

“You knew that Samat was working for Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov when you agreed to the marriage?”

Kastner looked at his daughter, then dropped his eyes. It was obviously a sore subject between them. Stella answered for her father. “It was not an accident that Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov contacted Kastner the two of them were acquainted from the days when the Sixth Chief Directorate was keeping track of the new cooperatives.”

“In the early nineteen-eighties,” Kastner explained, “Ugor-Zhilov was a small-time hoodlum in a small pond he ran a used-car dealership in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He had a KGB record: He’d been arrested in the early seventies for bribery and black market activities and sent to a gulag in the Kolyma Mountains for eight years. Read Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich and you will get a glimpse of what each day of Ugor-Zhilov’s eight years was like. By the time he made his way back to Armenia and scraped together enough money to open the used-car business, he was bitterly anti-Soviet; bitterly anti-Russian, also. He would have faded from our radar screen if he hadn’t set his sights on bigger fish in bigger ponds. He came to Moscow and in a matter of months cornered the used-car market there. One by one he bought out his competitors. Those who would not sell wound up dead or maimed. The punishment handed out by the Oligarkh was what you Americans call cruel and unusual he believed that it was good for business if his enemies had reason to dread him. When I spoke to Samat in Geneva, he passed on a story that Ugor-Zhilov had actually buried someone alive and had a road paved over him and this while several dozen workers looked on. The story of the execution may or may not be true either way it served its purpose. Few Russians were reckless enough to challenge the Oligarkh.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,” Martin observed.

“I was the conducting officer in charge of the investigation into the Oligarkh’s affairs.”

Martin saw where the story was going. “I’ll take a wild guess he paid off the Sixth Directorate.”

Kastner didn’t respond for a moment. “You have to put yourself in our shoes,” he said finally. “We were honest cops and we went after him in a straightforward manner. But he bought the minister in the Kremlin who ran the KGB, then he bought my colleague who was the head of the Sixth Chief Directorate, and then he turned to me and put a thick packet of money on the table, this at a time when we sometimes went several months without drawing a salary because of the economic chaos. What was I to do? If I accepted I would be on his payroll. If I refused I would seriously compromise my life expectancy.”

“So you defected to America.”

Kastner plucked his cigarette from the saucer and inhaled deeply, then sniffed at the smoke in the air. “It was the only solution,” he said.

“Knowing what you knew about uncle Ugor-Zhilov, why did you agree to let your daughter marry his nephew Samat?”

Stella came to her father’s defense. “Kastner agreed because he didn’t have a choice.”

Kastner said, very quietly, “You do not understand how things worked after communism collapsed. One morning there arrived in my mailbox downstairs here on President Street a letter typed on expensive bonded paper. It was not signed but I immediately understood where it came from. The writer said that his nephew was obliged to leave Russia, and quickly. It said that the best place for him to go would be Israel. It was a time when Jews were queuing up by the tens of thousands for visas at the Israeli embassy in Moscow; the Israeli Mossad, fearful that what was left of the KGB apparatus would try to infiltrate agents into Israel, was screening the Jewish applicants very carefully. And carefully meant slowly. Ugor-Zhilov obviously knew that my daughter Elena had joined the Lubavitch sect soon after we settled in Crown Heights. He knew that the Lubavitchers had a lot of influence when it came to getting Jews into Israel they could arrange for the Israeli immigration authorities to speed things up if there was a Lubavitch marriage involved, especially if the newlyweds planned to live in one of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which the I Israeli government at the time was eager to populate.”

Martin felt claustrophobic in the airless closet; he had a visceral revulsion for closed spaces without windows. “Something doesn’t make sense here,” he said, eyeing the door, mastering an urge to throw it open. “How could Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov send a letter to you if you sWere in the FBI’s witness protection “

Martin’s mouth sagged open; the answer to his question came to I him before Kastner supplied it.

“It was because he was able to send a letter to me,” Kastner said, “despite my being in the FBI program, that it was out of the realm of possibility to refuse him. Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov is one of the richest men in all of Russia; one of the fifty richest men in the world, according to that article in Time. He has a long arm, long enough to reach someone who has been given a new identity and lives on President Street in

Crown Heights.” He glanced at Stella and the two exchanged grim smiles. “Long enough,” Kastner continued, “to reach his two beautiful girls, also. When the Oligarkh asks for a favor, it is not healthy to refuse if you are confined to a wheel chair and have nowhere else to defect to.”

Martin remembered the words from the Bob Dylan song he’d heard in the street and he repeated them aloud: “Not much is really sacred.”

“Not true,” Kastner burst out. “Many things are still sacred. Protecting my daughters is at the top of the list.”

“Kastner could not be expected to anticipate how Samat would mistreat Elena,” Stella put in. “It was not his fault “

Kastner cut her off. “Whose fault was it if not mine?” he said despondently.

“Aren’t you running a risk by hiring me to find this Samat?”

“I only want him to give my Elena the religious divorce so she can marry again. What he does with his life after that is his affair. Surely this is not an unreasonable request.” Kastner worked the joystick, backing the wheelchair into the wall with a light thud. He shrugged his heavy shoulders as if he were trying to rid himself of a weight. “In terms of money, how do we organize this?”

“I pay my way with credit cards. When the credit card people ask me for money, I will ask you to pay my expenses. If I find Samat and your daughter gets her get, we’ll figure out what that’s worth to you. If I don’t find him, you’ll be out of pocket my expenses. Nothing more.”

“In your pool parlor you spoke of the problem of searching for a needle in a field of haystacks,” Stella said. “Where on earth do you begin looking for it?”

“Everyone is somewhere,” Martin informed her. “We’ll start in Israel.”

Stella, startled, said, “We?”

Martin nodded. “First off, there’s your sister she’ll trust me more if you’re with me when I meet her. Then there’s Samat. Someone on the run can easily change his appearances the color and length of his hair, for instance. He could even pass himself off as an Arab and cover his head with a kaffiyeh. I need to have someone with me who could pick him out of a crowd if she only saw his seaweed-green eyes.”

“That more or less narrows it down to me,” Stella agreed.

1997: MINH SLEEP WALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS

DRESSED IN LOOSE-FITTING SILK PANTS AND A HIGH-NECKED SILK blouse with a dragon embroidered on the back, Minh was clearing away the last of the dirty lunch dishes when Tsou Xing poked his head through the kitchen doors and asked her if she would run upstairs and check Martin’s beehives. He would do it himself, he said, but he was expecting a delivery of Formosan beer and wanted to count the cartons before they stored them in the cellar to make sure he wasn’t being short changed. Sure, Minh said. No problem. She opened the cash register and retrieved Martin’s keys and headed for the street, glad to have a few minutes to herself. She wondered if Tsou suspected that she had slept with Martin. She thought she’d spotted something resembling a leer in his old eyes when Tsou raised the subject of their upstairs’ neighbor earlier that week; he had been speaking in English but had referred to Martin using the Chinese word for hermit. Where you think yin shi goes when he goes? Tsou had asked. Minh had hunched her muscular shoulders into a shrug. It’s not part of my job to keep track of the customers, she’d replied testily. No reason climb on high horse, Tsou had said, whisking a fly from the bar with the back of his only hand. Not a crime to think you could know, okay? And he had smiled so wickedly that the several gold teeth in his mouth flashed into view. Well, I don’t know and I couldn’t care less, Minh had insisted. Pivoting on a heel, she had stalked off so Tsou would get the message: She didn’t appreciate his sticking his nose into her love life, or lack of same.

Now Minh rubbed her sleeve across the private-eye logo on Martin’s front door to clean the rain stains off of it, then let herself in and, taking the steps two at a time, climbed to the pool parlor. Actually, she did wonder where Martin had gone off to; wondered, too, why he hadn’t left a message for her as well as Tsou. She attributed it to Martin’s shyness; he would have been mortified if he thought Tsou had gotten wind of their relationship, assuming you could call their very occasional evenings together a relationship. She meandered through the pool parlor, brushing her fingers over his Civil War guns and the folders on his desk and the unopened cartons that contained heaven knows what. Soon after he’d moved in she had asked him if he wanted help opening them. He’d kicked at one of the cartons and had said he didn’t need to open them, he knew what was inside. The reply struck her as being very in character.

When Minh thought about it, which was more often than she liked to admit, the fact that she really wasn’t sure where she stood with yin shi exasperated her. He always seemed happy enough to see her but he never went out of his way to initiate meetings. Minh had been raised in lower Manhattan’s Chinatown, a cauldron simmering with refugees of one sort or another, so she knew one when she saw one; the thing that betrayed them was they seemed to be alone even in a crowd. She herself was in the country illegally, a refugee from Taiwan. Minh was not even her real name, a detail she’d never revealed to Martin for fear he might be shocked. Sometimes she had the weird feeling that Martin, too, was some kind of refugee though from what, she had no clue. Yin shi lived what she thought of as a boring life, ordering up the same dishes three or four nights a week, attending to his hives on the roof, making love to her when she turned up at his door. For excitement, he broke into hotel rooms to photograph husbands committing adultery, though when he described what he did for a living he managed to make even that sound boring. The single time she had raised the subject of boredom he had astonished her by admitting that he relished it; boring himself to death, he’d insisted, was how he planned to spend the rest of his life.