Legends

by Robert Littell

  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 officer’s 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 “cooperativ
es” 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 die-hard 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.”

  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 off-shore 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 o
ver 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 Israeli government at the time was eager to populate.”