Legends Read online

  Mustaffah slowed for an Israeli checkpoint, but was waved through when two soldiers peered through the window and mistook the passengers for Jews heading back to one of the settlements. The taxi sped past roadside carts brimming with oranges and zucchinis and restaurants with kabob roasting on spits and garages with cars up on cinder blocks and mechanics flat on their backs underneath them. It slowed again for a flock of sheep that scattered when Mustaffah leaned on the horn. Young Arab women with babies strapped to their backs by a shawl, older women in long robes with heavy bundles balanced on their heads trudged along the side of the road, turning their faces away to avoid the dust kicked up by the Mercedes barreling past.

  Half an hour out of Jerusalem, the taxi eased to a stop outside Kiryat Arba next to a sign that read: “Zionist Settlement—‘The more they torture him, the more he will become.’” Martin could see the two guards at the gate in the security fence watching them suspiciously. Both were armed with Uzis, with the ritual tzitzit jutting from under their bullet proof vests. While Stella retrieved the two valises from the trunk of the Mercedes, Martin walked around to the open passenger window to pay Mustaffah. From one of the minarets below, the recorded wail of the muezzin summoning the faithful to midday prayer drifted up to the Jewish settlement. Slipping three ten dollar bills through the window, Martin noticed that the framed license on the glove compartment had a photograph of Mustaffah, but identified him, in English, as Azzam Khouri.

  “Why did you tell me your name was Mustaffah?” he asked the driver.

  “Mustaffah, he was my brother killed by the Isra’ili army during the Intifada. We was both of us throwing stones at the Jewish tanks and they got mad and started throwing bullets back. Since, my mother calls me Mustaffah to pretend my brother is still being alive. Some days I call myself Mustaffah for the same reason. Somedays I’m not sure who I am. Today is such a day.”

  The guards at the gate scrutinized the passports of the visitors. When Stella explained that she was there to see her sister, Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov, they phoned up to the settlement, a sprawl of stone-faced apartment buildings and one-family houses spilling like lava down several once barren hills toward the Arab city of Hebron. Minutes later a battered pickup appeared at the top of the hill and slowly made its way, its spark plugs misfiring, past the playground teeming with mothers and little children to the gate. A moment later Stella and her sister were clinging to each other. Martin could see Stella talking quietly into the ear of her sister. Elena, or Ya’ara as she was now called, took a step back, shook her head vehemently, then burst into tears and fell back into her sisters arms. The driver of the pickup, a stocky, bearded man in his fifties, wearing black sneakers, a black suit, black tie and black fedora, approached Martin. He inspected him through windowpane-thick bifocals set into wire frames.

  “Shalom to you, Mr. Martin Odum,” he said with a distinct Brooklyn accent. “I’m the rabbi Ben Zion. You need to be Stella’s detective friend. I’m right, right?”

  “Right on both counts,” Martin said. “I’m a detective and I’m a friend.”

  “It’s me, the rabbi who married Ya’ara to Samat,” Ben Zion announced. “If you’re trying to track down Samat and get poor Ya’ara a religious divorce, I’ll give you the time of day. If not, not.”

  “How’d you know I was a detective? Or about my tracking down Samat?”

  “A little canary told someone in the Shabak, and that someone told yours truly that two tourists who weren’t touring anything but Kiryat Arba could be expected to wash up on our doorstep. Miracle of miracles, here you are.” The rabbi raised a hand to shield his eyes from the noon sun and sized up the Brooklyn detective who had found his way to Kiryat Arba. “So you’re not Jewish, Mr. Odum.”

  Behind them the two sisters started to walk up the hill, their arms around each other’s waists. Martin said, “How can you tell?”

  Rabbi Ben Zion tossed his head in the direction of Hebron, visible through swells of heat rising from the floor of the valley below them. “You don’t live in the middle of a sea of Arabs without recognizing one of your own when you see him.”

  “In other words, it’s a matter of instinct.”

  “Survival instinct, developed over two thousand years.” The rabbi pitched the two valises into the back of the pickup. “So be my guest and climb in,” he ordered. “I’ll take you to Ya’ara’s apartment. We’ll get there before the girls and cook up water for tea, and light a memorial candle for her father—the canary told me about the death in the family, too, but I thought it would be better if Stella broke the bad news to her sister. Ask me nicely and I’ll tell you what I know about the missing husband.”

  The rabbi threw the pickup into gear and, his sidecurls flying, gunned it up the hill, past the settlement post office, past the shopping center teeming with women in ankle length skirts and small boys wearing knitted yarmulke. Ya’ara, it turned out, lived in a small two-room apartment on the ground floor of one of the apartment buildings with a view of Hebron. “When her husband abandoned her, she had no resources of her own so our synagogue took her under its wing,” the rabbi explained. He searched through a ring of keys until he came to the right one and unlocked the door. The furnishings were Spartan. There was a narrow cot in one room, with a cracked mirror bordered with plastic sea shells over it and a wooden crate turned upside down serving as a night table. A folding bridge table covered with a square of oil cloth, a motley assortment of folding chairs with a small black-and-white television set on one of them, were scattered around what served as a living room. On the sill of a waist-high bookcase separating the living room from the tiny kitchen alcove were three flower pots containing plastic geraniums. Martin opened the door to the small bathroom. Women’s cotton underwear and several pairs of long woolen stockings hung from a cord stretched over the bathtub. Ben Zion noticed Martin’s expression as he returned to the living room. “We bought the furniture from Arabs whose houses were bulldozed between us and Hebron so we could walk to the Cave of Machpela safely.”

  Martin strolled over to the window, raised the shade and looked out at the tangle of streets and buildings that made up Hebron. “What’s the Cave of Machpela?” he called over his shoulder.

  The rabbi was in the kitchen alcove, attempting to light the gas burner with a match to boil water in a kettle. “Am I hearing you correctly? What’s the Cave of Machpela? It’s nothing less than the second holiest place for Jews on the planet earth, ranking immediately behind the Temple Mount or what’s left of it, the Wailing Wall. Hebron—which in biblical times was also called Kiryat Arba—is where the Patriarch Abraham bought his first dunams of land in Canaan. The Cave is where Abraham is buried; his sons Isaac and Jacob, his wife, Sarah, too. It is also holy to the Palestinians, who coopted our Abraham to be one of their prophets; they built a mosque on the spot and we are obliged to take turns praying at the cave.” Lighting a burner, the rabbi slid the kettle over the grill. Shaking his head in disbelief, he struck another match and lit a yortseit candle for the dead and carried it back into the room. “What is the Cave of Machpela?” he asked rhetorically, setting the candle on the table. “Even a shagetz ought to know the answer to that one. We always stroll down to the cave on Fridays at sunset to welcome the Sabbath in at this holy site. You and Stella are welcome to join us—that way you can tell the Shabak you actually did some sightseeing.”

  Martin decided there’d been enough small talk. “What about Samat?”

  Rabbi Ben Zion covered his mouth to smother a belch. “What about Samat?” he repeated.

  “Did he run off with another woman?”

  “Let me tell you something, Mr. Brooklyn detective who thinks men only leave their wives for other ladies. Samat didn’t need to quit his wife to have another lady—he rented all the ladies his libido desired. When he disappeared in his Honda for two, three days running, where do you think he went? It’s an open secret where he went. He went where a lot of men go when they want ladies to do things their wives w
on’t do. In Jaffa, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, there are what my mother, may she rest in peace, used to call houses of ill repute where you can get your ashes hauled by ladies who don’t mind being naked with a man, who, for a price, are willing to do anything to satisfy a client.” The rabbi waved a hand in the general direction of the Mediterranean coast. “Samat had sexual appetites, you could see it in his eyes, you could tell it from the way he looked at his sister-in-law Estelle when she visited Kiryat Arba. Samat also had his share of obsessions that weren’t carnal. What I’m saying is, he had other axes to grind besides sex.”

  In the kitchenette, the kettle began to shriek. The rabbi leaped to turn off the gas and set about preparing tea. He returned moments later carrying the kettle and four china cups, which he put on the bridge table next to the memorial candle. Leaning over the table the better to see what he was doing, Ben Zion slipped Lipton tea bags into the four cups and filled the first one with boiling water. When Martin waved it away, he took the cup himself and sank onto one of the folding chairs, his knees apart, his feet flat on the floor and tapping impatiently. Martin scraped over another chair and sat down facing him.

  “Why would someone like Samat, who needed to visit houses of ill repute to satisfy his lusts, marry a religious woman whom he had never met?”

  “Am I inside Samat’s head to know the answer?” The rabbi blew noisily across the cup, then touched his lips to the tea to test the temperature. Deciding it was too hot to drink, he set it down on the table. “He was a strange bird, this Samat. I am Ya’ara’s rabbi. In the Jewish religion we don’t confess to our spiritual leaders the way Catholics do. But we confide in them. I believed Ya’ara when she said that Samat never touched her on her wedding night, or after. He never slept in the marriage bed. For all I know she may still be a virgin. When Samat was living under the same roof with her, she was absolutely convinced something was wrong with her. I tried to persuade her that the something that was wrong was wrong with him. I tried to persuade him, too.”

  “Did you succeed?”

  The rabbi shook his head cheerlessly. “To use an old Yiddish expression, I never got to first base with Samat.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “Hiding.”

  “From what? From whom?”

  The rabbi tried his tea again. This time he managed to sip at it. “What am I, a reader of minds? How would I know, from what, from whom? Look, coming to live in one of these Jewish settlements in the middle of all these Arabs is a little like joining the French foreign legion: When you sign on the dotted line, nobody asks to see your curriculum vitae, we’re just glad to have your warm body. What I do know is that Samat went to the Kiryat Arba security officer and asked for a weapon. He said it was to protect his wife if the Hamas terrorists ever attacked.”

  “Did he get the weapon?”

  The rabbi nodded. “Anybody living in a settlement who can see what he’s shooting at can get a weapon.” Ben Zion remembered another detail. “Samat evidently had an endless supply of money. He paid for everything he bought with cash—an upscale split-level house on the side of Kiryat Arba where you get to enjoy the sunsets, a brand new Japanese car with air conditioning. He never played pinochle with the boys, he never accompanied Ya’ara to the synagogue, even on the high holy days, though it didn’t go unnoticed that she always left an envelope stuffed with cash in the charity box. Admit it, Mr. American detective, I’ll bet you don’t know that shamus is a Yiddish word.”

  “I thought it was Irish.”

  “Irish!” The rabbi slapped a palm against one of his knees. “The shamus was the synagogue beetle, which was the sobriquet for the member of the congregation who took care of the synagogue.” Ben Zion shook his head in puzzlement. “How, I ask you, is it possible to detect an AWOL husband if you can’t detect the origin of the word shamus?”

  The sudden arrival of Ya’ara and Stella saved Martin from having to account for this lapse in his education; it also provided him with his first good look at Samat’s wife. She was a short, overweight woman with a teenager’s pudgy face and a matronly body endowed with an ample bosom that put a strain on the buttons of her blouse; Martin feared that one of them would pop at any moment. In the space between the buttons he caught a glimpse of the pink fabric of a heavy brassiere. She wore an ankle-length skirt popular with Lubavitch women and a round flat-brimmed felt hat that she nervously twisted on her head, as if she were trying to find the front. The little patches of skin on her body that Martin could see were chalk white from lack of being exposed to sun light. Her cheeks were streaked with traces of tears. Stella, dry eyed, wore the ghost of a smile fixed on her lips that Martin had noticed the day she turned up at his pool parlor.

  The rabbi bounded to his feet when the women appeared at the door; Ya’ara stopped to kiss the mezuzah before she came in. Grabbing one of her hands in both of his, bending at the waist so that his head was level with hers, the rabbi bombarded her with a burst of Hebrew which, to the shamus’s ear, sounded more Brooklyn than biblical. Martin concluded that the rabbi was offering condolences because Ya’ara started sobbing again; tears cascaded down her cheeks and soaked into the tightly buttoned collar of her blouse. Ben Zion led Ya’ara to the yortseit candle and, rocking back and forth on the soles of his sneakers, started praying in Hebrew. Ya’ara, blotting her tears on the back of a sleeve, joined in.

  “Aren’t you going to pray for your father?” Martin whispered to Stella.

  “I only pray for the living,” she retorted fiercely.

  When the prayer ended the rabbi excused himself to organize the Sabbath pilgrimage to the Cave of Machpela, and Martin got his first opportunity to talk to Stella’s sister. “I’m sorry about your father,” he began.

  She accepted this with a shy closing of her lids. “I was not expecting him to die, and certainly not of a heart attack. He had the heart of a lion. After all he had been through—” She shrugged weakly.

  “Your sister has hired me to find Samat so that you can get a religious divorce.”

  Ya’ara turned on Stella. “What good will a divorce do me?”

  “It is a matter of pride,” Stella insisted. “You can’t let him get away with this.”

  Martin steered the conversation back to matters of tradecraft. “Do you have anything of his—a book he once read, a telephone he once used, a bottle of alcohol he once poured a drink from, a toothbrush even? Anything at all?”

  Ya’ara shook her head. “There was stationery with a London letterhead but it disappeared and I don’t remember the address on it. Samat filled a trunk with personal belongings and paid two boys to carry it down to the taxi when he left. He even took the photographs of our wedding. The only photograph left of him was the one Stella snapped after the ceremony and sent to our father.” At the mention of their father, tears trickled down her cheeks again. “How could Samat do this to a wife, I ask you?”

  “Stella told me he was always talking on the phone,” Martin said. “Did he initiate the calls or did people call him?”

  “Both.”

  “So there must be phone records showing the numbers he dialed.”

  Again she shook her head. “The rabbi asked the security office here to try and get the phone numbers. Someone even drove to Tel Aviv to interview the phone company. He reported back that the numbers were all on a magnetic tape that had been erased by error. There was no trace of the numbers he called.”

  “What language did he use when he spoke on the phone?”

  “English. Russian. Armenian sometimes.”

  “Did you ever ask him what he did for a living?”

  “Once.”

  Stella said, “What did he say?”

  “At first he didn’t answer. When I pressed him, he told me he ran a business selling Western-manufactured artificial limbs to people who had lost legs to Russian land mines in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kurdistan. He said he could have made a fortune but was selling them at cost.”

  “And you believed hi
m?” Stella asked.

  “I had no reason not to.” Ya’ara’s eyes suddenly widened. “Someone once called when he wasn’t here and left a phone number for him to call back. I thought it might have something to do with these artificial limbs and wrote it down on the first thing that came to hand, which was the back of a recipe, and then copied it onto the pad next to the telephone. I tore off the page and gave it to Samat when he returned to the house that day and he went to the bedroom and dialed a number. I remember that the conversation was very agitated. At one point Samat was even yelling into the phone, and he kept switching from English to Russian and back to English again.”

  “The recipe,” Stella said softly. “Do you still have it?”

  Both Stella and Martin could see Ya’ara hesitate. “You would not be betraying your husband,” Martin said. “If and when we find him, we are only going to make sure you get the famous get so you can go on with your life.”

  “Samat owes that much to you,” Stella said.

  Sighing, moving as if her limbs were weighted down by gravity, Ya’ara pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen alcove and pulled a tin box from one of the wall cupboards. She carried it back to the living room, set it on the folding table, opened the lid and began thumbing through printed recipes that she had torn out of Elle magazine over the years. She pulled the one for apple strudel out of the box and turned it over. A phone number starting with the country code 44 and city code 171 was scrawled on the back in pencil. Martin produced a felt tipped pen and copied the number into a small notebook.

  “Where is that?” Stella asked Martin.

  “Forty-four is England, 171 is London,” he said. He turned back to Stella. “Did Samat ever leave Kiryat Arba?” he asked.

  “Once, sometimes twice a week, he drove off by himself, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for several days.”