Legends

by Robert Littell

  “How do you know that?”

  The old man shrugged his bony shoulders. “I will not ask you how you know what you know. Do me the courtesy of not asking me how I know what I know. Samat fled from Israel. If you came knocking on my door today, it is because you somehow found a record of his phone conversations and traced the calls he made to this address in London, despite the fact that these phone records were supposed to have been destroyed. I will not ask you how you did that—the phone company is not permitted to reveal addresses corresponding to unlisted numbers.”

  “Why did you let me in if you knew I was lying about Samat?”

  “I calculated if you were clever enough to find me, you might be clever enough to lead me to Samat.”

  “Join the queue, Mr. Rabbani. It seems as if everyone I meet wants to find Samat.”

  “They want to find Samat in order to kill him. I want to find him in order to save his life.”

  “Do you know why he fled Israel?”

  “Certainly I know. He fled from Israel for the same reason he fled to Israel. Chechen hit men were after him. Have been since the Great Mob Wars in Moscow. Samat works for the Oligarkh—you’re smart, I’ll give you that, but not so smart that you’ve heard of him.”

  Martin couldn’t resist. “Samat’s uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov.”

  The old man cackled until the laugh turned into a grating cough. Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. He dabbed at it with the handkerchief as he gasped for breath. “You are a smart one. Do you know what happened during the Great Mob War?”

  “The Slavic Alliance battled the Chechen gangs. Over territory. Over who controlled what.”

  “At the height of the war the Chechens had about five hundred fighters working out of the Rossiya Hotel not far from the Kremlin. The leader of the Chechens was known by his nom de guerre, which was the Ottoman. The Oligarkh arranged to have him and his lady friend at the time kidnapped. Samat was sent to negotiate with the Chechens—if they wanted their leader back they would have to abandon Moscow and settle for some of the smaller cities that the Oligarkh was willing to cede to them. The Chechens said they needed to discuss the matter with the others. Samat decided they were playing for time—even if they agreed, there was no guarantee they would give up Moscow. He persuaded the Oligarkh that the Chechens needed to be taught a lesson. Next morning people going to work found the body of the Ottoman and his lady friend hanging upside down from a lamppost near the Kremlin wall—newspapers compared it to the death of Mussolini and his mistress in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War.”

  “And you call Samat a philanthropist?”

  “We all of us have many sides, my son. That was one side of Samat. The other was selling prostheses at cost to provide limbs to land-mine victims. I was one person before I stepped on the land mine and another after. What about you, Mr. Odum? Are you one dimensional or do you have multiple personalities like the rest of us?”

  Martin brought a hand up to his forehead to contain the migraine throbbing like the trains pulling into and out of the station. Across the room the old man carefully pulled another cigarette from a desk drawer and lit it with a wooden match, which he ignited with a flick of his fingernail. Once again the smog of a rain cloud rose over his head. “Who is paying you to find Samat, Mr. Odum?”

  Martin explained about the wife Samat had abandoned in Israel; how she needed to find her husband so he could grant her a religious divorce in front of a rabbinical court. Puffing away on his cigarette, Rabbani thought about this. “Not like Samat to abandon a wife like that,” he decided. “If he ran for it, it means the Chechens tracked him to that Jew colony next to Hebron. Chechens have long knives and long memories—I’ve been told some of them carry photographs cut from the newspapers of the Ottoman and his lady hanging upside down from a Moscow lamppost. The Chechens must have been knocking on Samat’s door, figuratively speaking, for him to cut and run.” Rabbani hauled open another drawer and retrieved a metal box, which he opened with a key attached to the fob of the gold watch in his vest pocket. He took out a wad of English bank notes and dropped them on the edge of the desk nearest Martin. “I would like to find Samat before the Chechens catch up with him. I would like to help him. He does not need money—he has access to all the money he could ever want. But he does need friends. I could arrange for him to disappear into a new identity; into a new life even. So will you work for me, Mr. Odum? Will you find Samat and tell him that Taletbek Rabbani stands ready to come to the assistance of his friend?”

  “If Samat is being hunted by the Chechens, helping him could come back to haunt you.”

  Rabbani reached for one of the canes and tapped it against his false limb. “I owe Samat my leg. And my leg has become my life. A Panjshiri never turns his back on such a debt, my son.”

  Martin pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the desk and fanned the stack of banknotes as if it were a deck of cards. Then he collected them and shoved them into a pocket. “I hope you are going to tell me where to start to look.”

  The old man picked up the pencil, scratched something on the back of an envelope and handed it to Martin. “Samat came here after he left Israel—he wanted to touch base with the projects to which he was especially attached. He stayed two days, then took a plane to Prague. There is an affiliate in Prague—another one of Samat’s pet projects—that’s doing secret work for him on the side. I met one of the directors, a Czech woman, when she came here to see Samat. She gave me her card in case I ever visited Prague.”

  “What kind of secret work?”

  “Not sure. I overheard the woman talking with Samat—the project had something to do with trading the bones of a Lithuanian saint for sacred Jewish Torah scrolls. Don’t ask what the bones of a saint have to do with Torah scrolls. I don’t know. Samat was very compartmented. The Samat I knew exported prostheses at cost. There were other Samats that I only caught glimpses of—one of them was concocting a scheme at the address I gave you in Prague.”

  Martin glanced at the paper, then held out a hand. Rabbani’s bony fingers, soft with paraffin-colored skin, gripped his as if he didn’t want him to leave. Words barely recognizable as human speech bubbled up from the old man’s larynx. “I see things from the perspective of someone who is knocking at death’s door. Apocalypse is just around the corner, my son. You are looking at me as if I belong in an asylum, Mr. Odum. I am in an asylum. So come to think of it are you. Western civilization, or what is left of it, is one big asylum. The happy few who understand this are more often than not diagnosed as crazy and hidden away in lunatic bins.” Rabbani struggled for breath. “Find Samat before they do,” he gasped. “He is one of the happy few.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Martin promised.

  Making his way back through the aisles toward the front of the warehouse, Martin passed three lean men wrestling cartons onto a dolly. Rabbani’s bodyguard, Rachid, stood apart, watching them with his unblinking eyes. The three men, all clean shaven, were dressed alike in orange jumpsuits with the insignia of a shipping company sewn over the zipper of the breast pocket. As Martin walked past, they raised their eyes to scrutinize him; none of them smiled. There was something about the men that troubled Martin—but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Mrs. Rainfield waved from her cubical as he headed down the cement corridor toward the front door. As he reached it a discreet crackle of electric current sizzled through the lock and the door clicked open. Out in the street, Martin waved cheerfully at the security camera over his head. He was still trying to figure out what it was about the three shippers that had caught his eye as he started up the street in the direction of Golders Green and the rooming house.

  The three men in orange jumpsuits piled the cartons so high on the dolly that the topmost one began to teeter. Rachid jumped forward to keep it from falling to the ground. “Watch what you are doing—” he started to say. He turned back to find himself staring into the bore of a silencer screwed into the barrel of
an Italian Beretta. It was aimed directly at his forehead.

  Rachid nodded imperceptibly, a Muslim authorizing the assassin to end his life. The man in the orange jumpsuit nodded back, acknowledging that Rachid was the master of his destiny, and squeezed the trigger. There was a muted hiss from the handgun, which recoiled slightly as a neat puncture wound materialized in Rachid’s forehead. The second man caught him under the armpits and lowered the body to the cement floor. The third man crossed the warehouse to Mrs. Rainfield’s office and rapped his knuckles on the glass door. She motioned for him to come in. “What can I do you, dear?” she asked.

  He produced a silenced pistol from the zippered pocket of his jumpsuit and shot her through the heart. “Die,” he replied as she slumped onto the desk, her lifeless eyes frozen open in bewilderment.

  Back in the warehouse, the two other men knocked on the door of Taletbek Rabbani’s office and entered. One of them held out the manifest. “Mr. Rabbani, there are two cartons of size six foot-prostheses missing,” one of them said as they approached his desk.

  “That is absolutely impossible,” Taletbek Rabbani said, snatching up his canes and pushing himself to his feet. “Did you ask Rachid—” He became aware of the handgun fitted with a silencer inches from his skull. “Who are you?” he whispered harshly. “Who sent you?”

  “We are who we are,” the man with the gun responded. He wrenched the canes out of Taletbek’s hands and, grabbing him by the wrists, dragged him across the warehouse, a Gucci loafer trailing at the end of the plastic prosthesis, to a stanchion near the body of Rachid. The man who had shot Mrs. Rainfield brought over a spool of thick orange packing cord and tied the old man’s wrists. Then he lobbed the spool over an overhead pipe and pulled on the cord until Taletbek’s arms, stretched directly above his head, were straining in their shoulder sockets and the toe of his good foot was scraping the cement. The man who appeared to be the leader of the team approached the old man.

  “Where is Samat?”

  Taletbek shook his head. “How is it possible to tell you something I myself do not know?”

  “You will forfeit your life if you refuse to help us find him.”

  “When you arrive in hell, I will be waiting for you, my son.”

  “Are you a Muslim?” the leader inquired.

  Taletbek managed to nod.

  “Do you believe in the Creator, the Almighty? Do you believe in Allah?”

  Taletbek indicated he did.

  “Have you made pilgrimage to Mecca?”

  Rabbani, his face contorted with pain, nodded again.

  “Say your prayers, then. You are about to meet the one true God.”

  The old man shut his eyes and murmured: “Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah.”

  From the inside of his boot, the leader of the team of killers drew a razor sharp dagger with a groove along its thin blade and a yellowing camel bone handle. He stepped to one side of the old man and probed the soft wrinkles of skin on his thin neck looking for a vein.

  “For the last time, where is Samat?”

  “Samat who?”

  The leader found the vein and slowly imbedded the blade into Taletbek’s neck until only the hilt remained visible. Blood spurted, staining the killer’s orange jumpsuit before he could leap out of the way. The old man breathed in liquidy gasps, each shallower than the previous one, until his head plunged forward and his weight sagged under the cord, pulling his arms out of the shoulder sockets.

  Martin dialed Stella’s number in Crown Heights from the booth and listened to the phone ringing on the other end. It dawned on him that he was looking forward to hearing her voice—there was no denying that she had gotten under his skin. “That really you, Martin?” she exclaimed before he could finish a sentence. “Goddamn, I’m glad to hear from you. Missed you, believe it or not.”

  “Missed you, too,” he said before he knew what he would say. In the strained silence, he imagined her tongue flicking over the chip in her front tooth.

  She cleared her throat. “What do you say we get the business part of the conversation out of the way first. Yes, there was an autopsy. For obvious reasons, it was done by a CIA doctor. The FBI man who Kastner dealt with when he needed something sent it to me, along with a covering letter. In it he said the police found no evidence of a break-in. The doctor who performed the autopsy concluded that Kastner’d died of a heart attack.”

  Martin was thinking out loud. “Maybe you should get a second opinion.”

  “Too late for another autopsy.”

  “What does that mean, too late?”

  “When nobody claimed Kastner’s body, the CIA had him cremated. All they gave me was his ashes. I walked halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge and screamed out the punch line from one of those old anti-Soviet jokes that Kastner particularly liked—’Be careful what you struggle for because you may get it’—and scattered the ashes in the river.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I hate when you say Uh-huh because I’m never sure what you mean by it.”

  “I don’t mean anything. I’m just buying time for my brain to work things out. Did you get to talk to Xing in the Chinese restaurant?”

  “Yes. He was very suspicious until I convinced him I was a friend of yours. He was annoyed you hadn’t come back for the funeral of the Chinese girl your bees killed.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said you were busy detecting and he seemed to settle for that. The girl—”

  “Her name was Minh.”

  “Minh died in great pain, Martin. The police who investigated it decided her death was an accident.”

  Martin offered up a short laugh. “The honey exploded by accident.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Did you find out what she was wearing when the bees attacked her?”

  “The Daily News story said she was wearing a white jumpsuit with the sleeves and legs rolled up. A pith helmet with mosquito netting attached to it was found near her body.” A police cruiser with a screaming siren tore past Martin, drowning out all conversation. When it quieted down Martin could hear Stella saying, “Oh, I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “The rolled up sleeves and legs—it was your jump suit, wasn’t it? Do you think … could it be that someone … oh, dear.” Stella lowered her voice. “I’m frightened, Martin.”

  “Me, too, I’m frightened. Seems as if I’m always frightened.”

  “Did your trip work out for you?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Want me to fly over and meet up with you? Two heads are better than one, remember. Two hearts, also.” He could almost hear the slight gasp of embarrassment. “No strings attached, Martin, it goes without saying.”

  “Why do things that go without saying get said?”

  “To avoid confusion. Hey, you want to hear a good Russian joke?”

  “Save it for when we meet again.”

  “I’ll settle for that.”

  “For what?”

  She said it very quietly. “For our meeting again.”

  Another police car could be heard coming down Golders Green, its siren wailing. Martin said quickly, “Bye.”

  “Yeah. Bye. Take care of yourself.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The police car was almost abreast of Martin and Stella had to shout to be heard. “There you go again.”

  Martin found a pub at the top of Golders Green and slid into a booth at the back. The waitress, a skinny young thing with one ear and one nostril and one eyebrow pierced and her navel visible below her short T-shirt, came around with the menu printed in chalk on a small blackboard. Martin ordered the special of the day and a half-pint of lager. He was sipping the lager and waiting for the special when there was a commotion in the front of the pub. People abandoned the bar and their tables to gather under the television
on an overhead shelf. The screen was not facing the back of the pub so Martin couldn’t make out what was being said. When the waitress came around with the pot pie and chips, he asked her what was happening.

  “People’ve been murdered in a warehouse stone’s throw from ’ere. Most exciting thing that’s ‘appened on Golders Green in a month of Sundays, don’t you know. That’s what all them police sirens was about.”

  Martin went around to the front of the pub and caught the end of the news item. “A warehouse, located immediately behind the train station, was the grisly scene of the multiple murders,” the male anchor said. “According to municipal records, the warehouse was being used as a depot for prostheses being shipped by a humanitarian group called Soft Shoulder to war ravaged countries.” The female anchor chimed in: “We’re now being told that three bodies were removed from the warehouse. They were identified as a Mr. Taletbek Rabbani, aged eighty-eight, an Afghan refugee who directed the humanitarian operation and who bled to death from a knife wound to his neck while tied to an overhead pipe; his associate, an Egyptian known only as Rachid, who was killed by a single shot to the head; and a secretary, Mrs. Doris Rainfield, who was also shot to death. A fourth woman is missing and police fear she may have been kidnapped by the team of hit men when they fled the scene of the crime. She was identified as Mrs. Froth, and was said to be the wife of the well known snooker player Nigel Froth.”

  Returning to his table, Martin found he’d lost all appetite for the pot pie. He raised a finger and caught the waitress’s eye and called, “Whiskey, neat. Make that a double.”

  He was nursing the whiskey and his bruised emotions when he suddenly remembered what it was about the three men in orange jumpsuits at the warehouse that had troubled him. Of course! Why hadn’t he seen it sooner? They had all been clean shaven. The upper halves of their faces had been ruddy, as if they’d spent most of their waking hours outdoors. But the lower halves had been the color of sidewalk—one of the men had razor nicks on his skin—which suggested that they had only recently shaved off thick beards in order to make it more difficult to identify them as Muslims.