Legends

by Robert Littell

  Elkanah Macy turned out to be a retired navy petty officer who, judging from the framed photographs lining one wall, had served on half the warships in the U.S. Navy during his twenty years in the service. He had converted the atelier in the Amish school basement into a replica of a ship’s machine shop, replete with calendar pinups of naked females. “Lelia sent you around, you say?” Macy remarked, sucking on a soggy hand-rolled cigarette as he sized up his visitors through hooded eyes. “Bet she went an’ told you the goddamn whopper ‘bout Dave Sanford being her great-great-great-grand-daddy. Hell, she tells that to anyone stands still long enough to hear her out. Listen to her tell it, anybody who did anything in Belfast was her kin—Sanford’s sawmill on the Genesee, the old cheese factory out on White Creek Road. Bet she went an’ told you ‘bout the goddamn ghosts in the attic. Ha! Take it from somebody that knows, lady’s got herself a sprightly imagination. Fact is, the first Sayles in Allegheny County were loansharks that went and bought up farmhouses cheap during the forties and sold them for a handsome profit to the GIs coming back from the war. What is it you want with the Amish over at White Creek?”

  Martin showed Mr. Macy the picture postcard. “You wouldn’t by any chance know where we could find these houses, would you?”

  “Might. Might not. Depends.”

  “On what?” Stella asked.

  “On how much you be willing to pay for the information.”

  “You don’t beat around the bush,” Stella observed.

  “Heck, not beating around the damn bush saves time and shoe leather.”

  Martin peeled off a fifty from a wad of bills. “What would half a hundred buy us?”

  Macy snatched the bill out of Martin’s fingers. “The two farm houses with the barn directly across from them are about three, three and a half miles out on McGuffin Ridge Road. Head out of Belfast on South Main and you’ll wind up on 19. Look for the Virgin Mary billboard with her one-eight-hundred number. Right after, you’ll cross 305 going west, bout a half mile farther on you’ll hit White Creek Road going south toward Friendship. For some of the way White Creek Road runs parallel to the factual creek. Long ‘bout halfway to Friendship, McGuffin Ridge Road runs off of White Creek. You got to be stone blind to miss it.”

  Martin held up another fifty dollar bill. “We’re actually looking for an old pal of mine who we think moved into one of the farm houses in that area.”

  “Your old pal Amish?”

  “No.”

  “Not complicated.” Macy snatched the second bill. “All them Amish get me over to unplug the damn electric meters and fuse boxes when they move in. Amish don’t take to electricity or the things that work off it—ice boxes, TVs, Singers, irons, you name it. You can tell an Amish lives in a house if the electric counter is hanging off the side of it, unplugged. You can tell someone who ain’t Amish lives there if’n the goddamn counter’s still attached.”

  “Are there a lot of non Amish living out on McGuffin Ridge Road?” asked Martin.

  When the janitor scratched at his unshaven chin in puzzlement, Martin came up with still another fifty dollar bill.

  “A-mazing how a picture of U.S. Grant can stir up recollections,” Macy said, folding the fifty and adding it to the other two in his shirt pocket. “Except for one house, McGuffin Ridge is all Amish. The one house is the second one on your picture postcard.”

  Stella turned to Martin. “Which explains why Samat sent this particular postcard to his mother.”

  “It does,” Martin agreed. He nodded at Macy. “That’s quite a fleet,” he remarked, glancing at the framed photographs on the wall. “You served on all those warships?”

  “Never been to actual sea in my life,” Macy said with a giggle. “Only served on them while they was in drydock, reason being I get seasick the minute a ship puts to sea.”

  “You certainly picked the wrong service,” Stella said.

  Macy shook his head emphatically. “Loved the goddamn navy,” he said. “Loved the ships. Didn’t much like what they was floating on, which was the sea. Hell, I’d re-up if they’d take me. Yes, I would.”

  Martin pulled the Packard into the gas station at the edge of town and bought a bottle of spring water and an Allegheny County map while Stella used the restroom. Heading out of town on 19, he felt her hand come to rest on his thigh. His body tensed—real intimacy, the kind that comes after sex, was a strange bedfellow to Martin Odum. In his mind’s eye, he thought of himself as being somewhere between Dante Pippen, who made love and war with the same frenetic energy, and Lincoln Dittmann, who had once gone off to Rome to try and find a whore he’d come across in Triple Border. Stella sensed the tenseness under her fingers. “I wasn’t lying to Mrs. Sayles,” she remarked. “It did go very nicely, thank you. All things considered, last night was a great start to our sex life.”

  Martin cleared his throat. “I am not comfortable talking about things like our sex life.”

  “Not asking you to talk about it,” Stella shot back, laughter in her voice. “Expecting you to listen to me talk about it. Expecting you to mumble uh-huh once in a while in quiet encouragement.”

  Martin glanced at her and said, “Uh-huh.”

  The Packard sped past the billboard advertising the one-eight-hundred number of the Virgin Mary. Half a mile beyond 305 they reached the junction with the signpost reading “White Creek Road” and “Friendship.” Martin turned onto White Creek and slowed down. When the highway dipped, he lost sight of the creek off to the right, only to spot it again when they topped a rise. In places the rippling water of White Creek reminded him of the Lesnia, which ran parallel to the spur that connected Prigorodnaia to the Moscow-Petersburg highway. The farmhouses along White Creek were set on the edge of the road to make it easier to get firewood and fodder in during the winter months when the ground was knee-deep in snow. The houses, spaced a quarter or a half mile apart, some of them with carpentry or broadloom workshops behind them and samples of what was being produced set out on raised platforms or porches, all had the electric meters and fuse boxes dangling off the clapboard walls. Amish going-to-market buggies could be seen in the garages, with cart mares grazing in adjoining fields. Occasionally children, dressed like little adults in their black suits or ankle-length dresses and bonnets and lace-up high shoes, would scamper out to the side of the road to stare shyly at the passing automobile.

  The McGuffin Ridge turnoff loomed ahead and Martin swung off White Creek. McGuffin was a mirror image of White Creek—the road crossed rolling farm country, with farm houses built close to the road, all of them with electric meters and lengths of black cable hanging off the walls. Three and a half miles into McGuffin Ridge, Stella tightened her grip on Martin’s thigh.

  “I see them,” he told her.

  The Packard, moving even more slowly, came abreast of the two identical clapboard farm houses built very close to each other. Across the road, a weathered barn stood atop a small rise. A crude American eagle crafted out of metal jutted from the ornate weather vane atop the mansard roof. Two Amish men in bibbed dungarees were sawing planks behind the first of the two houses. An Amish woman sat on a rocker on the porch crocheting a patch quilt that spilled off near her feet. As the Packard passed the second house, Stella looked back and caught her breath.

  “The electric meter is still attached to the house,” she said.

  “It’s a perfect setup for somebody who wants to melt into the landscape,” Martin said. “He can get the Amish women next door to cook for him. If anybody comes nosing around when he’s out, the Amish men will tell him. You didn’t notice an automobile anywhere around the house?”

  “No. Maybe he goes to town by buggy, like the Amish.”

  “Not likely. No car, no Samat.”

  “What do we do now?” Stella asked as Martin drove on down the road.

  “We wait until Samat comes back. Then we’ll dust off your father’s antique Tula-Tokarev and go calling on him.”

  Martin pulled the Packard off
the road beyond the next rise and he and Stella walked back to a stand of maple on a butt of land. On the far side of the stand, it was possible to see the two houses and the barn across the road from them. Sitting on the ground facing each other with their backs against trees, they settled down to wait. Martin pulled Dante’s lucky white silk scarf from a pocket and knotted it around his neck.

  “Where’d you get that?” Stella asked.

  “Girl gave it to someone I know in Beirut. She said it would save his life if he wore it.”

  “Did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to the girl?”

  “She lost her life.”

  Stella let that sink in. After awhile she said out of the blue, “Kastner was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  Martin avoided her eye. “What makes you think that?”

  “The FBI man, Felix Kiick, told me.”

  “In so many words? He said your father didn’t die of a heart attack?”

  “This Felix Kiick was a straight guy. Kastner trusted him. Me, too, I trusted him.”

  “So did I,” Martin agreed.

  “I thought about it a thousand times. I came at it from every possible direction.”

  “Came at what?”

  “His letter. The actual autopsy doesn’t mention the minuscule break in the skin near the shoulder blade. Mr. Kiick’s letter does.”

  “He said it was compatible with an insect bite.”

  “He was waving a red flag in front of my face, Martin. He was drawing my attention to something that was compatible with a lethal injection using a very thin needle. Kastner used to tell me about things like that—he said lethal injections were the KGB’s favorite method of assassination. In his day the KGB’s hit men favored a tasteless rat poison that thinned out the blood so much your pulse disappeared and you eventually stopped breathing. Kastner had heard they were working on more sophisticated substances that couldn’t be easily traced—he told me they had developed a clotting agent that could block a coronary artery and trigger myocardial infarction. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice Kiick’s reference to the insect bite.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And?”

  “Kiick’s the guy who suggested your father hire me to find Samat. Kiick spent the better part of his FBI career in counterterrorism. He crossed paths with the Company’s Deputy Director of Operations, Crystal Quest—”

  “The one you called Fred when you first spoke to Kastner.”

  “You have a good memory for things beside KGB jokes. Kiick must have known Fred didn’t want Samat found. And now Kiick’s waving the insect bite in front of our faces.”

  Stella seemed relieved. “So you don’t think I’m raving mad?”

  “You’re a lot of things. Raving mad is not one of them.”

  “If I didn’t know better, I might take that for a compliment.”

  “Someone else was killed around the time your father was being stung by an insect. Her name was Minh.”

  Stella remembered the Israeli Shabak officer telling Martin about the Chinese girl who’d been stung to death by his bees on the roof over the pool parlor. “What does one death have to do with the other?” she asked.

  “If your father was murdered, it means someone was trying to close down the search for Samat. Minh was killed tending my hives, which means she was wearing my white overalls and the pith helmet with mosquito netting hanging from it when something made the bees explode out of one of the hives.”

  “From a distance she would have looked like you.” Something else occurred to her. “What about those shots when we were walking from Kiryat Arba to that sacred cave—you told me two bullets from a high-powered rifle came pretty close to you.”

  “Could have been Palestinians shooting at Jews,” Martin said. He didn’t sound very convincing.

  “Maybe the same people who killed Kastner and your Chinese friend Minh were shooting at you.”

  “Uh-huh. The Oligarkh has a long reach. But we’ll never know for sure.

  “Oh, Martin, I think I’m frightened …”

  “Join the world. I’m never not frightened.”

  The long shadows that materialize immediately before sunset were beginning to stretch their tentacles across the fields. Martin, following his own thoughts, said, “You’ve changed the way I look at things, Stella. I used to think I wanted to spend the rest of my life boring myself to death.”

  “For someone who wanted to bore himself to death, you sure gave a good imitation of living an exhilarating life.”

  “Did I?”

  “Kiryat Arba, London, Prague, that Soviet island in the Aral Sea, that Lithuanian town rioting over who gets to keep the bones of some obscure saint. And then there’s the whole story of Prigorodnaia and the seven-kilometer spur that leads to it. Some boring life.”

  “You left out the most exhilarating part.”

  “Which is?”

  “You.”

  Stella pushed herself away from the tree to crouch next to him and bury her face in his neck. “Fools rush in,” she murmured, “where angels fear to tread.”

  The sun had vanished behind the hills to the west and a rose-gray blush had infused the sky overhead when they spotted the headlights coming down McGuffin Ridge Road from the direction of White Creek. Martin stood up and tugged Stella to her feet. The car appeared to slow as it neared the two farm houses. It swung away from them to climb the dirt ramp leading to the barn. The figure of a man could be seen pulling open the barn doors, and closing them after he’d parked the car inside. Moments later a porch light flicked on across the road in the nearest of the two houses. The man let himself into the house. Lights appeared in the ground floor windows. Martin and Stella exchanged looks.

  “I don’t want you to take any risks,” Stella said flatly. “If he’s armed, the hell with my sister’s divorce, shoot him.”

  Martin smiled for the first time that day. “You sure you told jokes for the KGB? You sure you weren’t one of their wetwork specialists?”

  “Wetwork?”

  “Hit men. Or in your case, hit women.”

  “I told killer jokes, Martin. Hey, I’m more nervous now than I was last night. Let’s get this over with.”

  In the gathering gloom, they made their way on foot down the white stripe in the middle of the road toward the two houses. Somewhere behind them a dog barked and a quarter of a mile farther along McGuffin Ridge other dogs began to howl. Through the porch windows of the second house, Martin could see the Amish family sitting down to supper at a long table lit by candles; everyone bowed their head as the bearded man at the head of the table recited a prayer. Martin checked the Tula-Tokarev to be sure the safety was off, then climbed silently onto the porch ahead of Stella and flattened himself against the clapboard to one side of the front door. He motioned for Stella to come up and knock.

  Speaking English with a thick Russian accent, the man who lived in the house could be heard calling, “Is that you, Zaccheus? I told you to bring the meal over at eight. It is not civilized to sit down to supper at the hour you Americans eat.” The door opened and a gaunt man, his face masked by a thick beard with only his seaweed-green eyes visible, regarded Stella through the screen. The porch light was above and behind her and her face was lost in shadows.

  “Who are you?” he asked. “What is it you’re doing out here this time of day?”

  Stella breathed, “Priviet, Samat.”

  Samat gasped. “Tyi,” he whispered. “Shto tyi zdes delaish?”

  Stella gazed directly into Samat’s eyes. “It’s him,” she said.

  Martin stepped into view, the antique Tula-Tokarev aimed at Samat’s solar plexus. Stella opened the screen door and Martin stepped across the sill. Samat, white spittle forming at one corner of his thin lips, backed into the room. He held his hands wide, palms up, almost in greeting. “Jozef, thanks to God, you are still among the living.” He started to pose questions in Russian. Martin realized that Jozef, like Stella an
d Samat, was a Russian speaker. He, Martin, could grasp words and phrases, sometimes the gist of a sentence, but an entire conversation in Russian was more than he could handle. He cut Samat off in mid sentence. “V Amerike, po-angliiski govoriat—in America, English is spoken.”

  “What are you doing with her?” Samat looked from one to the other. “How is it possible you know each other?”

  Stella seemed as dazed as Samat. “Don’t tell me you two know each other.”

  “Our paths have crossed,” Martin told her.

  Samat sank onto a couch. “How did you find me, Estelle?”

  Martin pulled over a wooden chair and, setting it back to front, straddled it facing Samat, the handgun resting on the top slat in the high back and pointed at his chest. Settling onto a bar stool, Stella flipped the picture postcard at Samat’s feet. Retrieving it from the floor, he took in the photograph, then turned it over to look at the post office cancellation stamp. “Zaccheus was supposed to mail this from Rochester,” he whined. “The son of a bitch never went farther than Belfast. No wonder you found the two houses on McGuffin Ridge.” He looked intently at Martin, then at the postcard. “Jozef, you went back to Prigorodnaia. You saw my mother.”

  “Why is he calling you Jozef?” demanded Stella, utterly mystified.

  Martin kept his eyes locked on Samat’s. “I missed you by a day or two. The priest said you’d flown off in your helicopter after delivering the tiny cross carved from the wood of the True Cross.”

  “Must you point that weapon at me?”

  Stella answered for him. “He definitely must, if only to make me feel better.”

  Mopping his brow with the back of a sleeve, Samat asked, “Jozef, how much do you remember?”

  “All of it.” In his mind’s eye Martin could visualize the first black-and-white photograph the Russian interrogator in Moscow had shown him; an emaciated figure of a man, whom the Russian identified as Kafkor, Joseph, could be seen, stark naked with a crown of thorns on his head, wading toward shore from the row boat, the two guards in striped shirts following behind him. “I remember every detail. I remember being tortured for so long I lost count of time.”