Legends

by Robert Littell

  “The opposite is true,” Martin assured her. “It mesmerizes me to tears.”

  Zuzana Slánská hiked one slim shoulder inside her tailored Parisian jacket. “We were ardent Marxists, my husband and I. We were convinced it was the great Russian bear that had suffocated communism and not the other way around. Our Czech hero, Alexander Dubcek, was still a loyal party-line apparatchik when we began signing petitions demanding reforms. The Soviet-appointed proconsuls who reigned over us could not distinguish between dissidents who were anticommunist and those, like us, who were procommunist but argued that it had gone wrong; that it needed to be set right in order for Marxism to survive. Or if they did distinguish between us, they calculated that our form of dissidence was the more threatening of the two. And so we suffered the same fate as the others.”

  Martin could see the muscles on her face contorting with heartache remembered so vividly that she seemed to be experiencing it now. “You must know the story,” she rushed on, barely bothering to breathe. “The one about the NKVD commissar admitting to Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin that a particular prisoner had refused to confess. Stalin considered the problem, then asked the commissar how much the state weighed, the state with all its buildings and factories and machines, the army with all its tanks and trucks, the navy with all its ships, the air force with all its planes. And then Stalin said, dear God, he said, Do you really think this prisoner can withstand the weight of the state?”

  “Did you feel the weight of the state? Were you and your husband jailed?”

  Zuzana Slánská had become so agitated that she began swallowing smoke and brandy in the same gulp. “Certainly we felt the weight of the state. Certainly we were jailed, some months at the same time and once even in the same prison, some months at different times so that we passed each other like ships in the night. I discovered that when you left prison you took the stench of it with you in your nostrils; it took months, years to get rid of it. Oh, once my husband returned from prison so beat up that I didn’t recognize him through the spy hole in the door and called the police to save me from a lunatic, and they came and looked at his identity card and told me it was safe to let him in, the lunatic in question was my husband. Does it happen in America, Mr. Odum, that the police must assure you it is safe to let your husband pass the door of your apartment? And then one day my husband was arrested for treating the broken ankle of a youth who turned out to be an anticommunist dissident hiding from the police. The journalists from America covering the trial pointed out in their stories that the same thing had happened to the American doctor who treated the broken ankle of A. Lincoln’s assassin.”

  From some murky past—from some murky legend?—the story of the Prague trial surfaced in Martin’s memory. “You’re the wife of Pavel Slánský!”

  “You recognize the name! You remember the trial!”

  “Everyone who followed events in Eastern Europe was familiar with the name Pavel Slánský,” Martin said. “The Jewish doctor who was arrested for setting the broken ankle of a dissident; who at his trial pleaded innocent to that particular charge, but used the occasion to plead guilty to wanting to reform communism, explaining in excruciating detail why it needed reforming to survive. He was the forerunner of the reformers who came after him: Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, eventually Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.”

  An uncontaminated smile, as fresh as laundered linen on a clothesline, materialized on Zuzana Slánská’s face. “Yes, he was ahead of his time, which in some countries is counted as a capital crime. The American authorities showed little sympathy for him—one suspects they did not want to see anyone attempt to reform communism, lest they succeed. My husband was declared to be an enemy of the state and condemned to ten years in prison for anticommunist activities. And I became like the poet Akhmatova, queuing at the prison guardhouse through the winters and springs and summers and falls to deliver packages of socks and soap and cigarettes addressed to prisoner 277103. The number is seared into my memory. The wardens took the packages and signed receipts promising they would be delivered. And then one day one of my packages was returned to me in the mail bearing the stamp Deceased, This tendency of bureaucracies in killer states to adhere to normal procedures and regulations has yet to be explained, at least to my satisfaction. In any case, that was how I discovered that my husband, the prisoner Slánský, was no longer among the living.” Zuzana Siánská raised a cold palm to swat away the cigar smoke drifting toward her from the nearby table. “May I have another of your amusing cigarettes? I need the eucalyptus to overpower the stench of their cigars. Oh, Mr. Odum, if one was able to put up with the inconveniences, I must tell you that dissidence was exhilarating.”

  “Aside from prison, what were the inconveniences?”

  “You lost your job, you were required to crowd into a fifty-square-meter apartment with the two couples already living in it, you were sent off to a psychiatric clinic to work out to the satisfaction of the state what made a dissident criticize something that was, by definition, perfect. When we would gather at an apartment late at night to discuss, oh, say, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, our small group considered all the angles, all the scenarios except the possibility that the gangsters who presided over the Soviet Union would become freelance gangsters presiding over the territory they had staked out when communism collapsed. Looking back, I can see now that we were incredibly naive. We were blinded by the exhilaration—each time we made love we thought it might be the last time and this turned us into ardent lovers, until the day came when we had no one to make love to. And so we stopped, most of us, being lovers and became haters.”

  “And the generic drugs—how did you get into that?”

  “I was a trained nurse but, after the trial of my husband, no doctor dared employ me. For years I worked at menial tasks—cleaning medical offices after they shut for the day, removing garbage cans from the courtyards of apartment houses to the street before dawn so the trucks could empty them. Finally, when our own communists were expelled from power in 1989, I decided to do what my husband always dreamed of doing—sell generic medicines to the third world at the lowest possible prices. I met Samat during one of his first trips to Prague and told him about my idea. He accepted at once to fund it as a branch of an existing humanitarian enterprise called Soft Shoulder—it was with his money that we rented the Vyshrad Station and bought the first stocks of generic medicines. Now I eke out enough profit to employ four gypsies and a part-time secretary. I once attempted to reimburse Samat but he refused to accept money. It must be said, he is something of a saint.”

  “I suppose it would take a saint to get involved in repatriating the bones of a saint,” Martin remarked.

  “I can say that I was the one who first told Samat about the Jewish Torah scrolls in the Lithuanian church.” Her hand drifted up to her neck to finger the Star of David. “My older sister was deported during the war to a concentration camp in Lithuania. She managed to escape into the steppe and joined the communist partisans harassing the German rear. It was my sister—her partisan name was Rosa, after the German communist Rosa Luxemburg; her real name was Melka—who attempted to warn the Jews in the shtetls not yet overrun by the Germans and the einsatzsgruppen murderers who followed behind them. Few believed her—they simply did not imagine that the descendants of Goethe and Beethoven and Brahms were capable of the mass murder of an entire people. But in several of the shtetls the rabbis hedged their bets—they collected the sacred Torah scrolls and priceless commentaries, some of them many hundreds of years old, and gave them to a Lithuanian Orthodox bishop to hide in a remote church. After the war my sister passed on to me the name of this church—Spaso-Preobrazhenski Sabor, which means Church of the Transfiguration, in the town of Zuzovka, on the Neman River just inside Lithuania near the frontier with Belarus. When I told the story to Samat, he dropped what he was doing—Samat, who was not as far as I know Jewish, went directly to the church to recover the Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel. The Metropoli
tan of the diocese refused to give them back; refused even to sell them back when Samat offered him a large sum of money. The Metropolitan was willing, however, to trade the Torah scrolls for the relics of Saint Gedymin, who established the Lithuanian capital in Vilnius in thirteen hundred something. Saint Gedymin’s bones had been stolen from the church by German troops during the war. After years of inquiry, Samat was finally able to trace the bones of the saint to Argentina. They had been smuggled there by Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of the war and deposited in a small Orthodox church near the city of Córdoba. When the church refused to part with the bones of Saint Gedymin, Samat went to see a person he knew in the Argentine government; in the Defense Ministry, actually. Samat told me he had persuaded the Defense Ministry to repatriate the saintly relics to Lithuania—”

  “In return for what?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. Samat mentioned that he’d been to see the people at the Argentine Defense Ministry. But he never told me what they wanted in exchange for the relics of Saint Gedymin.”

  “When did he tell you about the Defense Ministry?”

  “The last time he passed through Prague.”

  “Yes, and when was that?”

  “After he left Israel he went to London to see Taletbek Rabbani. From London he flew here to see me on his way to—”

  Martin became aware that Zuzana Slánská’s rheumy eyes had focused on something over his shoulder. He noticed her fingers slipping the Star of David out of sight under the collar of her blouse as he twisted in his seat to see what she was looking at. Radek, holding his deerstalker over his solar plexus, his other hand buried in the pocket of the Tyrolean jacket, stood at the doors of the salon du thé surveying the clients. He spotted Zuzana Slánská and Martin across the room and pointed them out with one of the brims of his deerstalker as he started threading his way through the tables toward them. A dozen men in civilian suits fanned out behind him.

  A gasp of pure dread escaped from Zuzana Slánská’s throat as she rose to her feet. She uttered the words, “Old age is not for the weak of heart,” then, her eyes fixed on Radek, her lips barely moving, she said: “There is an island in the Aral Sea twenty kilometers off the mainland called Vozrozhdeniye. During the Soviet era it was used as a bioweapons testing range. On the island is the town of Kantubek. Samat’s contact in Kantubek is a Georgian named Hamlet Achba. Can you remember all that?”

  “Vozrozhdeniye. Kantubek. Hamlet Achba.”

  “Warn Samat …” Radek was almost upon them. “Oh, it’s for sure I will not survive the stench of another prison,” she murmured to herself.

  Around them the waiters and the clients had frozen in place, mesmerized by the progress of Radek and his companions toward the two customers at the small table in the back of the room. Radek, a faint smile of satisfaction disfiguring his lips, reached the table. “I have a gub in my pocket,” he informed Martin. “It is a German Walther P1. You are arrested, Mister. You, also, Misses, are arrested.”

  Martin could feel the gentle rise and fall of the deck under his shoes (the laces, along with his belt, had been confiscated) as he waited for the interrogation to begin again. They had come for him at odd hours for the last several days, a technique designed to deprive him of sleep more than elicit information. As there was no porthole in his small cell immediately over the bilges of the houseboat or in the compartment above it, where the interrogations took place, he soon lost track of whether it was night or day. The only sound that reached his ears from outside were the foghorns of passing river ferries and the doppler-distorted shriek of sirens as police cruisers raced through the streets of Prague. From somewhere in the bowels of the houseboat came the dull throb of a generator; from time to time the bulb hanging out of reach over his head dimmed or brightened. Soon after Radek hustled him from the police van to the houseboat, which was tied to bollards on a cement quay down river from the Charles Bridge, he thought he caught the muted cry of a woman coming from another deck. When he re-created the sound in his head he decided it could have been the caterwaul of a cat prowling through the garbage bins on the quay. The grilling sessions in the airless compartment didn’t appear to fatigue the interrogator, a stooped, gaunt bureaucrat with an unshaven face and a shaven skull and an aquiline nose that looked as if it had been broken and badly set at some point in his life. Holding court from behind a small desk bolted to the planks of the deck, he fired off questions in a dispassionate monotone, only occasionally lifting his eyes from his notes. Radek, dressed now in a neat three-piece brown suit with narrow Austrian lapels, leaned against a bulkhead next to one of the two guards who escorted Martin to and from his cell. Martin sat facing the inquisitor on a chair whose front legs had been shortened so that the prisoner would feel as if he were constantly sliding off of it. Bright spotlights positioned on either side of the desk burned into his retinas, causing his eyes to tear and his vision to blur.

  “Do you have a name?” Martin had asked the gaunt man behind the desk at the very first session.

  The question appeared to have dismayed the interrogator. “What would it serve, your knowing my name?”

  “It would permit me to identify you when I file a complaint with the American embassy.”

  The interrogator had glanced at Radek, then looked back at Martin. “If you lodge a complaint, say that you were arrested by a secret unit attached to a secret ministry.”

  From his place along the wall, Radek had choked off a guttural laugh.

  Now the interrogator slid a small Pyrex percolator toward Martin. “Help yourself,” he said, gesturing toward the pot of coffee.

  “You’ve spiked it with caffeine to keep me awake,” Martin said tiredly, but he poured some into a plastic cup and sipped it anyway; they had fed him salted rice and not provided drinking water since his arrival on the houseboat. “Your techniques of interrogation are right out of those old American movies that Radek here is so crazy about.”

  “I do not deny it,” the interrogator said. “One must not be a snob when it comes to picking up tricks of the trade. In any case, it has been my experience that these techniques work in the end—I say this as someone who has been on both sides of the interrogation table. When I was arrested for anticommunist activities by the communists, in four days they were able to convince me to admit to crimes I had not committed using these very same techniques. And what has been your experience, Mr. Odum?”

  “I have no experience with interrogations,” Martin said.

  The interrogator sniggered skeptically. “That is not the impression your Central Intelligence Agency gave us. Their chief of station in Prague confides to us that you were once one of their paramount field operatives, someone so skilled at tradecraft it was said of you that you could blend into a crowd even in the absence of one.”

  “If I were half that good, how come I fell for Radek’s pitch at the airport?”

  The interrogator shrugged his stooped shoulders, which raised them for an instant to where they normally should have been. “Perhaps you are past your prime. Perhaps you were preoccupied with other thoughts at that particular moment. In any case, if you had not hired Radek—”

  “For the equivalent of one lousy U.S. dollar an hour,” Radek groaned from the wall.

  “If you had not hired him, you would surely have wound up in one of the three taxis we had positioned outside. The drivers, all of whom call themselves Radek, work for us.”

  Martin identified a piece of the puzzle that was missing: How could Radek’s service have known he would turn up in Prague? Obviously the CIA chief of station had been talking to his Czech counterpart about Martin. And the chief of station reported to the Deputy Director of Operations, Crystal Quest. Which brought Martin back to what he’d told the late Oscar Alexandrovich Kastner in the windowless walk-in closet on President Street a lifetime ago: I’d like to know why the CIA doesn’t want this particular missing husband found.

  “Your station chief,” the interrogator was saying, “claims
you are no longer employed by the CIA. He says you are a freelance detective. It could be true, what he says; it could also be that they are simply denying any connection to you because you have been caught in the act. So tell me, Mr. Odum. What weapon systems were you contracting to buy at the Vyshrad Station. More importantly, who were you buying them for?”

  “Zuzana Slánská sells generic medicines.”

  “The woman you call Zuzana Slánská was never legally married to the doctor Pavel Slánský, who, as you surely know, was convicted as an enemy of the state during the communist period. Her real name is Zuzana Dzurova. She assumed the name Slánská when she learned of Pavel’s death in prison. As for the generic medicines, we have reason to believe they are a front for one of the most prolific weapons operations in Europe.” The interrogator pulled a report from one of the cardboard file boxes on the desk, pried a staple loose with his thumbnail and extracted the third page. He fitted on a pair of rimless reading glasses and began to quote from the text. “… operating in conjunction with Mr. Taletbek Rabbani in London, who claims to be selling prostheses at cost to third world countries …” The interrogator looked up from the paper. “It is surely not lost on you that both Mr. Rabbani’s prosthesis operation in London and Zuzana Slánská’s generic medicine operation here in Prague were funded by the same individual, a Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who until recently was living in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan River in order to shelter himself from the gang wars raging in Moscow.”