Legends

by Robert Littell

  She became exasperated when Martin didn’t laugh. “When I delivered the punch line at the Moscow Writers Union, people would roll on the floor. Someone in subsection Marx tracked the joke—it spread across Moscow in three days and reached Vladivostok in a week and a half. The Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket actually applauded. And you don’t get it?”

  “I get it, Stella. It’s not funny. It’s pathetic. When your joke spread across Russia, people weren’t laughing. They were crying.”

  Stella thought about that. “There may be something to what you say. Hey, where are you calling from this time? Murmansk on the Barents Sea? Irkutsk on Lake Baikal?”

  “Listen up, Stella. Do you remember the first time I ever phoned you?”

  “How could I forget. You called to tell me you didn’t have a change of mind, you had a change of heart. You were phoning from—”

  He cut her off. “I was calling from a booth that reeked of turpentine.”

  He could hear her catch her breath. “On the corner of—”

  He interrupted her again. “Could you find the booth if your life depended on it?”

  She said, very calmly, “My life does depend on it.”

  “Do me a favor and bring the autopsy report on your father that the FBI guy sent you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Uh-huh. That time when I met your father, he removed a pearl-handled souvenir from the pocket of his robe and put it on a shelf where I could see it. I’d like to get my hands on that object, if it’s possible.”

  “Anything else?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I’d like to inspect the night moth.”

  “No problem,” she said. “It goes where I go.”

  They were nursing mugs of lukewarm coffee in a booth at the back of the twenty-four-hour diner on Kingston Avenue, two stores down from Throckmorton’s Minimarket. Stella kept looking up at Martin; phrases formed in her mind only to become stuck on the tip of her tongue. When she had turned up at the phone booth on the corner of Lincoln and Schenectady, they had hugged awkwardly for a moment. The faint aroma of rose petals seeped from under the collar on the back of her neck. Stella had said something about how they really ought to kiss, and they did, but the kiss was self-conscious and quick, and a disappointment to both of them. At a loss for words, he’d remarked that he’d never seen her in anything but pants. She said she’d worn the tight knee-length black skirt to disguise herself as a woman. He’d actually managed a smile and said that the deception could have fooled him. He asked her if she had taken precautions to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She explained how she had strolled over to an ice cream parlor on Rogers Avenue crammed with teenagers playing electronic pinball machines, then ducked out a back door into an alleyway and made her way through empty side streets to Schenectady and the phone booth. Nodding, he had taken her by the arm and steered her wordlessly in the direction of the all-night diner on Kingston. Sitting across from her now, he noticed the new front tooth; it was whiter than the rest of her teeth and hard to miss. Her hair was pulled back and twined into a braid that plunged out of sight behind her shoulder blades. He recognized the small wrinkles fanning out from the corners of her eyes, which were fixed in a faint squint, as if she were trying to peer into him. The three top buttons of her man’s shirt were open, the triangle of pale skin shimmering on her chest.

  Martin cleared his throat. “You threatened to show me the tattoo the next time we met.”

  “Here? Now?”

  “Why not?”

  Stella looked around. There were four Chinese women in a booth across the diner playing mahjongg, and a young man and a girl two booths away staring so intently into each other’s eyes Stella doubted they would be distracted by anything less than an earthquake. She took a deep breath to work up her nerve and undid three more buttons on her shirt and pulled the fabric away from her right breast. Visions invaded Martin’s brain: a neon light sizzling over a bar on the Beirut waterfront, a room upstairs with the torn painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Acre, the night moth tattooed under the right breast of the Alawite prostitute who went by the name of Djamillah. “You want the God honest truth?” he whispered. “Your Siberian night moth takes my breath away.”

  The ghost of a smile materialized on Stella’s lips. “That’s what it’s supposed to do. The Jamaican tattoo artist on Empire Boulevard said I could have my money back if it didn’t bowl you over. Maybe now one thing will lead to another.”

  He reached for her hand and she folded her other hand on top of his, and they both leaned across the table and kissed.

  Settling back, Martin said, “Business first.”

  “I like your formula,” Stella said, rebuttoning her shirt.

  He looked surprised. “Why?”

  “Reading between the lines, it puts pleasure on the agenda.”

  A smile touched his eyes. “Did you bring the autopsy report?”

  She pulled the report and the letter that had come with it from her leather satchel and unfolded them on the table. Martin skimmed the autopsy report first: … myocardial infarction … clot superimposed on plaque in coronary artery already constricted by cholesterol buildup … abrupt and severe drop in blood flow … irreparable trauma to a portion of the heart muscle … death would have been almost instantaneous.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Uh-huh what?”

  “The CIA doctor seems to be saying your father died a natural death.”

  “As opposed to an unnatural death? As opposed to murder?”

  Martin started reading the covering letter the FBI had sent with the autopsy report. No trace of forced entry … even if there had been, Mr. Kastner had a charged Tula-Tokarev within arm’s reach … no evidence of a struggle … unfortunately not unusual for people confined, like Mr. Kastner was, to a wheelchair to experience blood clots originating in a leg that work their way up to the coronary arteries… minuscule break in the skin near a shoulder blade compatible with an insect bite … Feel free to call me on my unlisted number if you have any questions. Martin looked up. “Did you father go out often?”

  “Kastner never left the house. He didn’t even go into the garden behind the house. He spent his time cleaning and oiling his collection of guns.”

  “If he didn’t go out, how did he get bitten by an insect?”

  “You aren’t convinced by the autopsy report?”

  Martin glanced at the signature at the bottom of the letter, then stiffened.

  Stella asked, “What’s not right?”

  “I used to know a Felix Kiick who worked for the FBI.”

  “There was another agent in charge of the Witness Protection Program when Kastner and I and Elena came over in 1988. We met him several times when we were living at the CIA safehouse in Tyson’s Corner outside of Washington. The agent retired in 1995—he came to President Street to introduce the person who was taking his place. That’s how we met Mr. Kiick.”

  “Short? Stumpy? With a low center of gravity that makes him look like an NFL linesman? Nice, open face?”

  “That’s the one. Do you know him?”

  “Our paths crossed several times when I worked for the CIA. I knew him as a counterterrorism specialist, but they probably booted him upstairs at the end of his career. The Witness Protection people are usually running in place, waiting for retirement to catch up with them.” Martin thought of something. “When I met your father, he mentioned that he’d gotten my name from someone in Washington. Was that someone Felix Kiick?”

  Stella could see that the question was bothering Martin. She considered carefully before answering. “Kastner called the unlisted number in Washington we’d been given in case we needed anything. Now that you mention it, it was Mr. Kiick who said there was a good detective living not far from us. He recommended you, but he told Kastner not to tell you where he’d gotten your name.”

  Martin seemed to be focusing on horizons that Stella couldn’t see. “So it was no accident that I wo
und up walking back the cat on Samat Ugor-Zhilov.”

  Stella said, “I brought the souvenir with the pearl handle.” She opened the satchel and tilted it so Martin could see her father’s Tula-Tokarev. “It’s an antique, but it still shoots. It was Kastner’s favorite handgun. From time to time he went down to the basement and fired it into a carton filled with roof insulation, then he’d recover the bullet and examine it under a low-powered microscope. I brought bullets for it, too.”

  Stella touched her lips to the coffee but found it had grown cold. Martin signaled for refills. The waiter, a teenage boy with long sideburns and a silver stud in the side of a nostril, brought two steaming mugs of coffee and took away the old ones. Stella said, “What about Samat?”

  “I think I know how to locate him.”

  “Quit.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Quit. Forget Samat. Concentrate on locating me.”

  “What about your father?”

  “What’s Kastner have to do with your deciding to quit?”

  “He hired me. He’s dead, which means he can’t unhire me.” Martin reached again for her wrist but she snatched it back. “I haven’t come all this way to quit now,” he insisted.

  “You’re crazy.” She noticed the expression on his face. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You’re not crazy crazy. You are imperfectly sane. Admit it, your behavior is sometimes borderline. In your shoes anyone else would shrug and get on with his life.”

  “You mean his lives.”

  Martin reached again for her wrist. This time she didn’t pull away. He fingered her watch and began absently winding the stem. “Samat’s in America,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  He produced the picture postcard and told her how he had tracked Samat from Israel to London to Prague to Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea to the Lithuanian village of Zuzovka, and finally to the village of Prigorodnaia not far from Moscow where Samat’s mother, Kristyna, lived in the empty dacha once owned by the most hated man in Russia, Lavrenti Beria. “She told me she was a raving lunatic when she needed to be,” Martin said. “She told me she wrapped herself in lunacy the way a peasant pulls a sheepskin coat over his shoulders in winter.”

  “Sounds to me like a survival strategy.” Stella examined the photograph on the postcard—the men and boys attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls wearing ankle-length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin. She turned it over and translated the message. “Mama dearest, I am alive and well in America the Beautiful … Your devoted S.” She noticed the printed caption had been scraped off. “Where on God’s green earth is fast New York?” she demanded, squinting at the post office cancellation mark across the stamp.

  “I’ve done my homework. The people in the photograph are Amish. Belfast, New York is the rough center of the Amish community that lives upstate New York, and the only town upstate that ends in fast. It makes tradecraft sense. All the men have long beards. Instead of shaving off his beard, which is what the Russian revolutionaries used to do when they wanted to disappear, Samat would keep his and dress like the Amish and melt into the madding crowd.”

  “Who’s he hiding from?”

  “For starters, Chechen gangsters bent on revenge for the killing of one of their leaders known as the Ottoman. Then there’s your sister, also his uncle Akim, who claims Samat siphoned off a hundred and thirty million dollars from holding companies he controlled. For some reason I can’t figure out, the CIA seems to be very interested in him, too.”

  “Where do I come in?”

  “When you described Samat to me in the pool parlor—”

  “That seems so long ago it must have been during a previous incarnation.”

  “You’re talking to a world-class expert on previous incarnations. When you described him, you said his eyes were seaweed-green and utterly devoid of emotion. You told me if you could see his eyes, you would be able to pick him out of a crowd.” Martin lowered his voice. “I don’t mean to push you past where you’re ready to go—how come you know his eyes so well?”

  Stella turned away. After a moment she said, “You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t imagine the answer.”

  “You saw his seaweed-green eyes up close when you slept with him.”

  Stella groaned. “The night of the wedding, he came to my room in the early hours of the morning. He slipped under the covers. He was naked. He warned me not to make a commotion—he said it would only hurt my sister when he told her I’d … I’d invited him.” Stella looked into Martin’s eyes. “I’d know his eyes anywhere because I memorized them when he fucked me in the room next to my sister’s bedroom on the night of her marriage to this monster of a man. I was originally planning to stay in Kiryat Arba for three weeks, but I left after ten days. He came into my bed every night I was there …”

  “And when you returned two years later?”

  “I took him aside the first day and told him I’d kill him if he came into my bed again.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He only laughed. At night he would turn the doorknob to torture me, but he didn’t come into the room. Martin, you’ve got to tell me the truth—does this change anything between us?”

  He shook his head no.

  Stella permitted the ghost of a smile to settle softly onto her lips again.

  1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS THE GET

  DRIVING IN THE VINTAGE PACKARD HE HAD BORROWED FROM HIS friend and landlord, Tsou Xing, the owner of the Mandarin restaurant below the pool parlor on Albany Avenue, Martin and Stella reached Belfast after dark. The pimply boy working the pump at the gas station on the edge of town ticked off on grimy fingers the choices available to them: a bunch of descent hotels in town, some pricier than others; an assortment of motels along Route 19 either side of town, some seedier than others; several bed and breakfasts, best one by a country mile was old Mrs. Sayles place on a groundswell overseeing the Genesee, the advantage being the riot of river water which lulled some folks to sleep, the disadvantage being the riot of river water which kept some folks up until all hours.

  They found their way to the house on the river with “B & B” and “Lelia Sayles” etched on a shingle hanging from a branch of an ancient oak, and reached through the tear in the screen to work the knocker on the front door. As they didn’t have luggage, Martin was obliged to cough up $30 in advance for a room with a matrimonial bed, bathroom down the hall, kindly go barefoot if you use the facilities during the night so as not to wake the ghosts sleeping in the attic. They went out to get a bite to eat at a diner across from the public library on South Main and lingered over the decaf, both of them trying to put off the moment when there would be no turning back. Parking on the gravel in Mrs. Sayles’s driveway afterward, Martin decided the Packard’s engine oil level needed checking. “I’m every bit as agitated as you,” Stella murmured, reading his mind as he propped up the hood. She started toward the house, then wheeled back when she reached the porch, her left palm drifting up to the triangle of pale skin visible on her chest. “Look at it this way, Martin,” she called. “If the sex doesn’t work out to everyone’s expectations, we can always fall back on the erotic phone relationship.”

  “I want sex and the erotic phone relationship,” he replied.

  Stella angled her head to one side. “Well, then,” she said, laughter replacing the nervousness in her eyes, “maybe you ought to stop monkeying with the damn motor. I mean, it’s not as if either of us were virgins.”

  “How’d it go?” Mrs. Sayles asked the next morning as she set out dishes of homemade confitures on the kitchen table.

  Martin, irritated, demanded, “How’d what go?”

  “It,” Mrs. Sayles insisted. “Heavens to Betsy, the carnal knowledge part. I may be pushing eighty from the far side, but I’m sure as hell not brain dead.”

  “It went very nicely, thank you,” Stella said evenly.
<
br />   “Loosen up, young fellow,” Mrs. Sayles advised when she noticed Martin buttering a piece of toast for the second time. “You’ll be a better bed partner for it.”

  Hoping to change the subject, Martin produced the picture postcard.

  “My great-great-great-grandfather, name of Dave Sanford, built the first sawmill on the banks of the Genesee River,” Mrs. Sayles explained, all the while rummaging through a knitted tote bag for her reading glasses. “That was long about 1809. This house was built in 1829 with lumber from that mill. Belfast was a one-horse town in those days. Nothing but forests far as the eye could see, so they say, so they say. When the lumber boom wore out the forests, most folks turned to raising cattle. The White Creek Cheese Factory, which is famous ‘round here, was founded long about 1872 by my great-grandfather—”

  Stella tried to steer the conversation back to the Amish. “What about the picture on the postcard?”

  “It’s going to stay a blur until I come up with my reading spectacles, dear child. Could have sworn I put them in here. Never could figure out how a body can find her reading spectacles if she’s not wearing them. Well, I’ll be, here they are, all the while.” Mrs. Sayles fitted them on and, accepting the postcard from Stella, held it up to the sunlight streaming through a bay window. “Like I was saying, I know the Amish crowd up on White Creek Road pretty good because of my family’s connection with the White Creek Cheese Factory. Hmmmm.” Mrs. Sayles pursed her lips. “Truth to tell, I don’t reckon I recognize any of the Amish on this here picture postcard.”

  “How about the houses and the barn?” Martin said, coming up behind her, pointing to the two clapboard houses built very close to each other, to the barn with a mansard roof on a rise across from them.

  “Houses, barn neither. Mind you, there are an abundance of Amish living on the small roads sloping off White Creek. Picture could have been taken on any one of them.” Mrs. Sayles had an inspiration. “There’s a fellow, name of Elkanah Macy, works as a janitor over at the Valleyview Amish school on Ramsey Road. He moonlights as a handyman for the Amish out in the White Creek area. If anybody can help you, he can. Be sure to tell Elkanah it was me sent you around.”