Legends

by Robert Littell

  Martin didn’t join in the celebration. He was having second thoughts about leaving Zuzana Slánská in the clutches of the devious Radek. In his mind’s eye he could visualize the weight of the state crushing the breath out of her brittle body.

  Standing on the fo’c’sle, Radek had watched the red taillights grow dimmer as the Skoda made its way along the quay toward the ramp. When the lights brightened and the car braked to a stop, the interrogator, standing next to him and peering through binoculars, grunted in irritation. Moments later, when the taillights finally started up the ramp and disappeared on the street above the quay, the two men clasped hands to salute a scheme well hatched. The interrogator flicked back the sleeve of his leather jacket to look at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. “I will alert our people that the American is on his way south,” he said. “The Oligarkh has wired instructions to our ministry—he wants the trail to Samat to end at the Slánská woman.”

  Radek, pressing a handkerchief to his head wound to stop the bleeding, took out a small flashlight and signalled with it in the direction of the green garbage bin down the quay from the houseboat. Moments later the two heavies who had escorted Martin to and from his cell appeared on the gangplank. Radek motioned for them to follow him as he headed for the small cell two decks under the bow. They found Zuzana Slánská sitting on her metal cot, her eyes swollen with fear, her legs tucked under her body, her arms hugging the blanket over her shoulders despite the absence of a breath of air in the room. “Is it time for another interrogation already?” she asked, her fingers toying with the Star of David at her neck as she unwound from the sitting position on the cot and stood up. Instead of waving her through the door, the two guards positioned themselves on either side of the woman and gripped her arms above the elbows. Zuzana’s eyes widened as Radek stepped forward and wrenched her blouse out of the waistband, baring her stomach. When she caught sight of the small syringe in his hand, she struggled to break free, but the two men only tightened their holds on her arms. Thoroughly terrified, Zuzana began to sob silently as Radek jabbed the needle into the soft flesh of her navel and depressed the plunger. The drug took effect rapidly—within seconds Zuzana’s eyelids drooped, then her chin fell forward onto her chest. While the two heavies held her up, Radek produced a small pocket knife and began cutting strips from the blanket on the cot. He twisted the strips into cords and tied two of them end to end. Then he dragged the metal cot into the center of the cell under the light bulb and, climbing up on the bed, attached one end of the makeshift cord to the electric wire above the bulb. He pulled on it to make sure it would hold. The heavies hauled Zuzana’s limp body onto the cot under the bulb and held her up while Radek fashioned a noose and tightened it around the woman’s neck. Then he jumped free of the cot and kicked it onto its side and the three men stepped back and watched Zuzana’s body twisting slowly at the end of the cord. Radek grew impatient and motioned with a finger—one of the heavies grabbed her around the hips and added his weight to hers to speed up the execution. Clucking his tongue, Radek rolled his head from side to side in mock grief. “It is clearly not the state’s responsibility if you turned out to be suicidal,” he informed the woman strangling to death in the middle of the room.

  Crystal Quest’s features clouded over as she fitted on narrow spectacles and read the deciphered “Eyes Only” action report from Prague Station that her chief of staff had deposited on the blotter. The two wallahs who had been briefing her on the mass graves recently uncovered in Bosnia exchanged looks; they had lived through enough of the DDO’s mood swings to recognize storm warnings when they saw them. Quest slowly looked up from the report. For once she seemed tongue-tied.

  “When did this come in?” she finally asked.

  “Ten minutes ago,” the chief of staff replied. “Knowing your interest, I thought I’d walk it through instead of rout it.”

  “Where did they find the Skoda?”

  “On one of those narrow cobblestoned streets on the Hradcany Castle side of the river.”

  “When?”

  “Twelve hours ago, which was a day and a half after the Czechs watched him drive off down the quay.”

  The wallahs slumped back in their chairs and gripped the arm rests to better breast the storm. To their utter surprise, a cranky grin crept over Quest’s crimson lips.

  “I love that son of a bitch,” she whispered harshly. “Where did they find the bullets?”

  The chief of staff couldn’t help smiling, too. “On the front seat of the car,” he said. “Six 9-millimeter Parabellums set out in a neat row. They never found the handgun.”

  Quest slapped at the action report with the palm of her hand. To the attending wallahs it came across as applause. “Naturally they never found the handgun. He would have deep-sixed it in the Vltava. Oh, he’s good, he is.”

  “He ought to be,” agreed the chief of staff. “You trained him.”

  Quest was rolling her head from side to side in satisfaction. “I did, didn’t I. I trained him and ran him and repaired him when he broke and ran him again. Some legends back, when we were playing Martin as Dante Pippen, I remember him coming in from a stint with that Sicilian Mafia family that was offering to sell Sidewinders to the Sinn Féin diehards in Ireland. He had us all in stitches telling us about how the Sicilians left pistols lying around where anybody could pick them up and shoot them. The catch was they were loaded with dummy bullets, which weighed less than real bullets if you took the trouble to heft them in your palm. Dante”—Quest started giggling and had to catch her breath—“Dante wanted us to leave pistols loaded with dummy bullets lying around Langley. He was only half kidding. He said it would be a quick way to separate the street-smart agents from the street-dumb ones.”

  “They may still find him if he went to ground in Prague,” observed the chief of staff.

  “Dante isn’t in the Czech Republic,” Quest said flatly. “He would have found half a dozen ways of getting across their silly little border.”

  “We’ll catch up with him,” the chief of staff promised.

  But Quest, her head still bobbing with pleasure, was following her own thoughts. “I love the guy. I really do. What a goddamned shame we have to kill him.”

  “I need to get this off my chest,” Stella said, cutting short the small talk. “I’ve never had an erotic phone relationship before.”

  “I didn’t realize our conversations were erotic.”

  “Well, they are. The fact that you call is erotic. The sound of your voice coming from God knows where is erotic. The silences where neither of us knows quite what to say, yet nobody wants to end the conversation, is endlessly erotic.”

  They both listened to the hollow silence. “It is not written that we will ever become lovers,” Martin said finally. “But if we do, we must make love as if each time could be the last.”

  His remark took her breath away. After a moment she said, “If we were to make love, I have the feeling time would stop in its tracks, death would cease to exist, God would become superfluous.” She waited for Martin to say something. When he didn’t she plunged on: “It exasperates me that we only just met—I lost so much time.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Translate that, please.”

  “Time is something you can’t lose,” Martin said. “Memory is another story.”

  He listened to her breathing on the other end of the phone four thousand miles away. “Consider the possibility,” he said, “that we can talk intimately because of the distance between us—because the phone provides a measure of safety. Consider the possibility that the intimacy will evaporate when we come face to face.”

  “No. No. I don’t think it will; I’m sure it won’t. Listen, before Kastner and I came to America I was in love with a Russian boy, or thought I was. I look back on it now as something that was pleasantly physical, as first loves tend to be, but not erotic. The two are a universe apart. My Russian boy friend and I talked constantly when we weren’t groping each other o
n some narrow bed in some narrow room. Thinking about it now, I remember endless strings of words that had no spaces between them. I remember conversations that were without silences. You know how you can split an atom and get energy. Well, you can do the same with words. Words contain energy. You can split them and harness the released energy for your love life. Are you still there, Martin? How do you interpret my love affair with the Russian boy?”

  “It means you weren’t ready. It means you are now.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Ready for naked truths, as opposed to crumbs of truth.”

  “Funny you should say that. Do you know Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate? It’s a great Russian novel, one of the greatest, right up there with War and Peace. Somewhere in it Grossman talks about how you can’t live with scraps of truth—he says a scrap of truth is no truth at all.”

  Martin said, “I’ve had to make do with scraps—maybe that’s what’s pushing me to find Samat. Maybe somewhere in the Samat story there’s a naked truth.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Not sure.” He laughed under his breath. “Intuition. Instinct. Hope against hope that the king’s horses and the king’s men can somehow put the pieces together again.”

  1997: MARTIN ODUM IS ACCUSED OF HIGH AND LOW TREASON

  “LOOK, IF YOU PLEASE, DIRECTLY AHEAD OF US—THERE ARE THE hulls,” Almagul shouted over the din of the ancient Soviet outboard that was powering her eight-meter skiff across the Aral Sea toward Vozrozhdeniye Island. “Ten years ago there was a bay here with the port for Kantubek at the top of it. The ships you see became stranded when the rivers feeding the Aral Sea were diverted and the sea level sank.”

  Martin shielded his eyes with a hand and squinted into the dazzling sunlight. He could make out the hulls of a tanker, a tug boat, a Soviet-era torpedo boat, eight ships in all, half sunken into the sand and the salt residue in what had once been a bay. “I see them,” he called to the girl.

  “You must wear gloves now,” she shouted, and she raised a hand from the outboard tiller to show that she had already fitted hers on over the sleeves of the frayed fisherman’s sweater that buttoned across one shoulder. Martin pulled the yellow latex kitchen gloves over the cuffs of his shirt sleeves and attached thick rubber bands at the wrists of each of them. He knotted Dante’s white silk scarf around his neck for good luck and tucked his pants legs into the knee-length soccer stockings the girl had given him when they left the Amu Darya—one of the two rivers trickling into the Aral Sea—the night before. As the skiff drew closer to the salt beach a flock of white flamingoes, frightened by the clatter of the motor, beat into the air. Martin spotted the first buildings of Kantubek, now a deserted shell of a town except for the scavengers who came from the mainland to plunder what was left of the once grandiose Soviet bioweapon testing site. Almagul, something of a tomboy who claimed to be sixteen, though she easily might have been a year or two younger, had been coming here regularly with her father and her twin sister before they both died two years before—of a mysterious illness that had left them feverish, with swollen lymph glands and mucus running from their nostrils. (Before her sister’s death, Almagul had been known as Irina but, following local tradition, had taken the name of her twin sister, Almagul, to perpetuate her memory.) On the island, the father and his daughters would collect lead and aluminum and zinc-covered steel water pipes and copper wiring, as well as stoves and sinks and faucets and, when nothing else could be found, wooden planking pried up from the floors of buildings, and sell everything on the mainland to men who loaded the loot onto flatbed trucks and headed over the dusty plains toward Nukus or up to the city of Aral on the Kirgiz Steppe. Almagul hadn’t been back to Vozrozhdeniye since the death of her father and her sister but Martin, arriving on a Yak-40 milk from Tash Kent, learned that she was the only person in Nukus with a skiff and a working outboard who had been to the island. He tracked her down to a one-room shack at the edge of the river and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse—and then doubled it when he discovered she was studying English in the gymnasium and could translate for him as well. They had started down the Amu Darya loaded with spare jerry cans of gasoline and a straw hamper filled with camel-milk yogurt, goat cheese and watermelon.

  “Over there is Kantubek,” the girl was shouting now as she veered toward a dune at the foot of the town and idled the motor to let the skiff glide onto the sandy shore. Martin scrambled onto the bow and jumped the last half-meter to shore and turned to haul the skiff higher onto the beach. Clearly emotional at this first trip back to the island since the death of her father, Almagul joined him and stood with her gloved hands on her hips, looking around anxiously. Her Soviet manufactured djeans, tied with a rope through the loops at the waist, were tucked into fisherman’s rubber boots secured at the tops with lengths of elastic. She kicked at broken test tubes and petri dishes half buried in the sand, and waved toward the piles of debris littering the path that curved up the dunes toward dozens of wooden buildings in various stages of dilapidation. Martin could see mountains of rusting animal cages of all shapes and sizes, rotting timber, scores of broken crates. He glanced at the sky, measuring the height of the sun. “I’ll explore the town,” he told the girl. “If all goes well, I’ll be back here by mid afternoon.”

  “I am not able to remain past the setting of the sun,” Almagul informed him. “My father had an iron rule never to spend the night on the island. In the light of day is possible to see rodents, maybe even fleas. After it turns dark …”

  Heading down the Amu Darya at half throttle the night before so as not to anger the men fishing from its banks with spotlights and grenades, Almagul had explained about the dangers awaiting visitors to Vozrozhdeniye. Fearing that American inspection teams monitoring the 1972 treaty banning biological weapons would turn up on the island, the Soviets, in 1988, had hidden tens of tons of bacterial agents in hastily dug pits. They had also buried in shallow ditches thousands of cadavers of monkeys, horses, guinea pigs, rabbits, rats and mice that had been used to test the lethality of the bacterial agents. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early ’90s, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan took custody of the island, but never bothered to dig up the buried spores or the cadavers, which had infected the island’s rodent population. The rodents tended to survive the anthrax, glanders, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, botulinum toxin or Venezuelan equine encephalitis, but eventually transmitted the sicknesses to fleas which, in turn, transmitted them to other rodents. Which meant that a simple flea bite on the island could be fatal to a human. The risks were very real. In the two years since the death of her father, Almagul knew of fourteen men from Nukus who had disappeared while scavenging on Vozrozhdeniye Island; local authorities around the rim of the receding Aral Sea presumed the missing men had been bitten by fleas and had died of plague or another sickness on the island’s dunes, and their bones picked clean by the flamingoes.

  Almagul had dropped hints that bio agents or viruses spread by fleas weren’t the only things to be found in the ghost town on the island. When Martin drew her out, she said that a handful of scavengers, commanded by a warlord, had installed themselves in the ruins of Kantubek. Did the warlord have a name? Martin asked. My father, who read the bible each night before going to sleep, called the warlord Azazel after the evil spirit in the wilderness to whom a scape-goat is sent on the day of Atonement, the girl replied. Others in Nukus say he is a Danish prince with the name of Hamlet Achba. This Hamlet and his gang demand twenty-five percent of the value of what anyone carries off from the island. Almagul was betting that the warlord wouldn’t bother a visiting journalist who wanted to write about the once secret Soviet bioweapons testing range for a Canadian magazine, or the girl who took him there and back to earn enough to see her through the winter.

  Favoring his game leg, Martin started up the track that snaked through the dunes. At the top he turned to wave at Almagul, but she had hiked herself onto a crate to watch the
flamingoes, with their distinctive bent bills, returning to the beach and didn’t notice him. Topping a rise, he headed toward the ghost town along the main road, which consisted of slabs of concrete set end to end. In a field at the edge of town he spotted a basketball court that had been converted into a helicopter landing pad—a great white circle had been whitewashed onto the cement and its surface blackened by engine exhaust. Farther down the street he passed a vast hangar that had once housed Kantubek’s motor pool. Most of the sections of corrugated roofing had been carted off but the vehicles, buried in drifts of sand, remained—gutted green trucks, two treadless T-52 tanks, two armored personnel carriers sitting on their axles, a faded orange bus that had been driven up onto a cement ramp to be serviced and never driven off, a once-red fire engine with the hood open and the entire motor missing, the rusting hulks of half a dozen ancient tractors with faded Soviet slogans painted on their sides. Continuing on into the town, Martin came upon an enormous building with a ragged Soviet hammer and sickle flag still flapping from the pole jutting over the tarnished double doors that led to an ornate lobby. A giant mosaic depicting the weight of the state, in the form of formations of tanks and squadrons of planes and fleets of ships, filled the entire windowless wall at the side of the lobby. Signs with the Cyrillic lettering bleached out by the sun hung off lampposts. Dust and sand stirred by gusts of wind swirled around Martin’s feet at the intersections.