Legends Read online

  “Right you are, gov’nor. You American, are you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It’s the accent, gov’nor. I know American when I hear it.”

  “Actually I’m Polish,” Martin had said, “but I’ve lived in America and it rubbed off.”

  The driver had tittered into the microphone. “I can tell someone what’s pulling me leg, gov’nor. If you’re Polish, that makes me an Eskimo.”

  Martin had paid off the taxi in front of the Golders Green underground station. Standing under the word “Courage” engraved in the stone monument at the top of Golders Green, he took his bearings, then set off down the broad avenue awash in sunlight and filled with midday pedestrians—Filipino maids pushing old ladies tucked into wheel chairs, teenage boys in embroidered skull caps careening past on mountain bikes, dozens of ultrareligious women wearing wigs and long dresses window shopping in front of stores with signs in English and Hebrew. Martin found a second-hand store run by a Jewish charity and bought himself an old valise that looked as if it had been around the world several times. He made a slit in the frayed silk lining under the lid and hid his stash of documents, then filled the valise with threadbare but serviceable clothing. He came across a second-hand Aquascutum that they were practically giving away because the belt was missing and the hem was in tatters. At a chemists, he bought more toothpaste, a disposable razor and a small tube of shaving cream. On Woodstock Avenue off Golders Green he spotted a ramshackle house next to a synagogue with a sign on the unkempt lawn advertising rooms for rent. He paid the grumpy landlady for a week in advance, stored his gear and went around the corner for a bite to eat at a kosher delicatessen across the street from a church. Midafternoon he walked up Golders Green to the Chinese Medicinal Center for a session of acupuncture on his game leg. When he complained that his leg felt sorer after the acupuncture, the old Chinese man, plucking the long needles deftly out of Martin’s skin, said it was well known that things had to get worse before they could get better. Leaving a ten pound note on the counter, Martin promised he would bear that in mind. Starting back toward the rooming house, he noticed he was able to walk with less pain than before; he wondered whether it was due to the acupuncture needles or the power of suggestion. He bought a phone card at a tobacco shop and ducked into a fire-engine red booth on the corner of Woodstock and Golders Green that had a burnt phone book dangling from a chain. He rummaged in his wallet for the scrap of paper with the phone number that Elena had found on the back of the strudel recipe and, inserting his plastic card, dialed it.

  Martin retrieved Dante Pippen’s rusty Irish accent for the occasion. “And who would I be speaking to, then?” he inquired when a female voice came on the line.

  “Mrs. Rainfield, dear.”

  “Good morning to you, Mrs. Rainfield. This is Patrick O’Faolain from the phone company. I’m up on a pole on Golders Green trying to sort out your lines. Could you do me the favor of pressing the number five and the number seven on your phone, in that order.”

  “Five, then seven?”

  “That’s the ticket, Mrs. Rainfield.”

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Loud and clear. Do it once more to be sure, will you, now?”

  “Okay?”

  “Beautiful. We ought to be hiring the likes of you.”

  “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “Don’t ask me how but your cable seems to have gotten itself twined around your neighbors’ lines. One of them complained she heard cross talk when she tried to use her phone. Did you experience any static on yours, Mrs. Rainfield?”

  “Now that you mention it, the phone did seem fuzzier than usual this morning.”

  “You ought to be hearing me clear as a bell now.”

  “I am, thank you.”

  “We spend most of our time climbing up phone poles to fix things that aren’t broken. Now and then it’s gratifying to fix something that is. You get half the credit—it was child’s play once you hit the five and the seven. For my work sheet I’ll be needing your full name and an address to go with your phone.”

  “I’m Doris Rainfield,” the woman said, and she gave an address on North End Road, a continuation of Golders Green, behind the railroad station.

  “Thanks a mill.”

  “Ta.”

  Martin pressed the buzzer next to the enormous steel door with “Soft Shoulder” engraved on a brass plaque and looked up into the security camera. There was a burst of static over the intercom. A woman’s nasal voice surfed above the static.

  “If you’re delivering, you need to go round to the loading dock in back.”

  “Mr. Martin Odum,” Martin called, “come to see the director of Soft Shoulder.”

  “Are you the bloke what’s shipping the prostheses to Bosnia?”

  “Afraid not. I was sent by a friend of the director’s, a Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov.”

  “Wait a min, love.”

  The static gave way to an eerie quiet. A moment later the woman whom Martin took for Mrs. Rainfield came back on the intercom. “Mr. Rabbani, he wants to know how you know Mr. Ugor-Zhilov.”

  “Tell him,” Martin said, employing the phrase Kastner had used the day they met on President Street, “we’re birds of a feather.”

  “Come again?”

  “Yes, well, you can tell Mr. Rabbani that I know Samat from Israel.”

  There was another interval of silence. Then a discreet electric current reached the lock in the door and it clicked open the width of a finger. Martin pushed it wide open and strode into the warehouse. He heard the door click closed behind him as he headed down the cement passageway lined with calendars from the 1980s, each with a photograph of a spread-eagled movie starlet flirting with nakedness. In the glass enclosed cubical at the end of the passageway, a young woman with pointed breasts and short hair the color and texture of straw sat behind a desk, painting her fingernails fuchsia. Martin poked his head through the open door. “You will be Doris Rainfield,” he guessed.

  The woman looked up, intrigued. “Samat went and told you ‘bout me, did he, dear?” She batted the fingers of her right hand in the air to dry the nail polish. “I like Samat, I do. Oh, he’s one for putting on airs, waltzing in with that topcoat of’is flung over ’is shoulders like it was some kinda cape or other. He looked like the sheik in one of them Rudy Valentino silent period pictures, if you get my drift.”

  “I do get your drift, Mrs. Rainfield.”

  The woman lowered her voice to share a confidence. “Truth is I’m not Mrs. Rainfield. I used to be Mrs. Rainfield but I got myself legally hitched six weeks and three days back to Nigel Froth, which makes me Mrs. Froth, doesn’t it, dear? Do you recognize the name? My Nigel’s a world class snooker player. Made the quarter finals of the U.K. snooker championship last year, lost to the bloke who came in second, he did, which was a feather in ‘is cap, I’m referring to Nigel’s cap, not the bloke who came in second’s cap. I still use my first husband’s name at the office because that’s what Mr. Rabbani calls me. All the paperwork ‘ere is in the name of Rainfield and he says it’d be a bloody pain in the you know what to switch over.”

  Martin leaned against the door jamb. “Does Mrs. Rainfield act any differently than Mrs. Froth?”

  “I s’pose she does, now that you mention it. My Mr. Froth fancies me in miniskirts and tight sweaters, he does. Mr. Rainfield wouldn’t ’ave let me outa me house dressed like this. It’s a lot like Samat’s cape, isn’t it, dear? What you wear is who you want to be.” Fluttering unnaturally long lashes, Mrs. Rainfield pointed out the door at the bitter end of the passageway with her eyes. “Through there, then cross the warehouse on a diagonal and you’ll fall on Mr. Rabbani’s bailiwick. His factotum, an Egyptian named Rachid—trust me, you won’t miss him—minds the door.”

  “Is Rachid his real name or is it a matter of Mr. Rabbani not wanting to redo the paperwork?”

  Mrs. Rainfield giggled appreciatively.

  Mar
tin said, “Thank you” and started down the corridors created by stacks of cartons, all of them stencilled with the word “Prosthesis” and “Arm” or “Leg” and a measurement in inches and centimeters, along with a notation in smaller print that the articles had been manufactured in the United States of America. Above Martin’s head, diffused sunlight streamed through skylights stained with soot and bird droppings. A heavy-set man with unshaven jowls and untidy hair, clearly the body guard, loomed beyond the last cartons. A handwritten nametag pinned to the wide lapel of his double-breasted suit jacket identified him as Rachid.

  “You carrying?” he inquired, sizing Martin up with eyes that conveyed indifference to the visitor’s fate in the unlikely event he resisted inspection.

  Martin played a role he wasn’t accustomed to: innocent. “Carrying what?”

  Rachid snapped, “Something the municipal police might mistake for a handgun.”

  Grinning, Martin spread his legs apart and raised his arms. The bodyguard frisked him very professionally, passing his hand so high up the crotch that he grazed his penis with his knuckles, causing Martin to shudder.

  “You ticklish, then?” the bodyguard remarked with a smirk. He inclined his head in the direction of a door with a neatly lettered plastic placard on it that said “Taletbek Rabbani—Export.” Martin knocked. After a moment he knocked again and heard the scratchy voice of an old man call out weakly, “So what are you waiting on, my son, a hand delivered invite?”

  Looking like a parenthesis, Taletbek Rabbani sat on a high stool hunched over a high desk, a thick cigarette dangling from his bone-dry lips, a smog of smoke hovering over his bald head like a rain cloud. An old man who must have been nudging ninety, he was not much thicker that the pencil clasped in his arthritic fingers. A tuft of coarse white hair protruded from under his lower lip and served as a receptacle for the ash that dropped off the burning end of the cigarette. A swell of warm air enveloped Martin as he stepped into the room; the old man kept his office heated to near sauna temperatures. Settling onto a tattered settee with the tag “Imported from Sri Lanka” still attached to one spindly wooden leg, Martin could hear the water gurgling through the radiators. “Taletbek Rabbani sounds like a Tajik name,” he remarked. “If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say you were a Tajik from the steppes of the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. I seem to remember there was a tribal chief named Rabbani who presided over a cluster of mountain villages near the frontier with Uzbekistan.”

  Rabbani waved his skeletal fingers to dispel the cigarette smoke and get a better look at his visitor. “You have been to Afghanistan?” he demanded.

  “In a previous incarnation I hung out for the better part of a year near the Khyber Pass.”

  Rabbani was still trying to get a handle on Martin’s curriculum vitae. “What were you doing, my son, buying or selling?”

  “Buying. Stories. I was debriefing fighters going into and out of Afghanistan and writing them up for a wire service.”

  An ephemeral smile crossed Rabbani’s age-ravaged eyes. “Wire service, my foot. Only people who hung out at the Khyber Pass were American intelligence agents. Which means you were on the same side as my older brother, the tribal chieftain Rabbani.”

  Martin had guessed as much once he’d placed Rabbani’s name; he hoped that this would get him off on the right track with the old codger who, he now noticed, kept his left hand out of sight below the desk. His fingers were certainly wrapped around the butt end of a pistol.

  “What happened to your brother after the Russians were kicked out?”

  “Along with everyone else in the valley, he got caught up in the civil war—he fought alongside Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Taliban when they abandoned their medrassahs in Pakistan and started to infiltrate into Afghanistan. One day the Taliban invited my brother to meet under a white flag in the outskirts of Kabul.” The same smile appeared in Rabbani’s eyes, only this time it was tainted with bitterness. “I advised him against going, but he was strong headed and fearless and shrugged off my counsel. And so he went. And so the Taliban cut his throat, along with those of his three bodyguards.”

  “I vaguely remember the incident.”

  Rabbani’s left hand came into view, which told Martin that he had passed muster.

  “To have been at the Khyber, to remember Rabbani,” the old man said, “you must have worked for the CIA.” When Martin neither confirmed nor denied it, Rabbani nodded slowly. “I understand there are things that are never spoken aloud. You must forgive an old man for his lack of discretion.”

  Martin could hear trains pulling into or out of the station next to the warehouse with the rhythmic throb that was almost as satisfying as travel itself. “If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Rabbani, how did you wind up in London?”

  “I was dispatched by my brother to England to purchase medical supplies for our wounded fighters. When my brother was murdered, a cousin on my mother’s side profited from my absence to usurp the leadership of the tribe. My cousin and I are sworn enemies—tribal custom prevents me from exposing to you the reason for this feud while there is no representative of my cousin present to defend the other side of the matter. Suffice it to say that it became healthier for me to stay on in London.”

  “And you went into the business of selling prostheses with Samat?”

  “I don’t know how well you know Samat,” Rabbani said, “but he is a philanthropist at heart. He provided the start-up money to lease this warehouse and open the business.”

  “The Samat I know does not have a reputation as a philanthropist,” Martin said flatly. “He wheels and deals in many of the weapons that lead to the loss of limbs. If he is in the business of selling false limbs to war-torn countries, there must be a healthy profit in it.”

  “You misread Samat, my son,” Rabbani insisted. “And you misread me. Samat is too young to be interested only in profit, and I am too old. The cartons filled with false limbs that you saw on the way to my office are sold at cost.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You clearly do not believe me.” Rabbani slipped awkwardly off of the high stool and, retrieving two wooden canes that had been out of sight behind the desk, made his way across the room. When he stood before the settee, he hiked the trouser on his left leg, revealing a skin-colored plastic prosthesis with a Gucci loafer fitted onto the end of it.

  Martin asked quietly, “How did you lose your leg?”

  “I was told it was a land mine.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Some nights fleeting images of what happened surface in my brain: a deafening explosion, the taste of dirt in my mouth, the stickiness of my stump when I reached down to touch it, the feeling I had for months that the leg was still there and I could feel pain in it. The images seem to come from the life of another, and so I have trouble reconstructing the event.”

  “Psychiatrists call that a survival mechanism, I think.”

  Leaning on one cane and then the other, Rabbani returned to his high chair and hefted himself into it. “I first met Samat when I was buying Soviet surplus arms and munitions in Moscow in the early nineties so that Massoud and my brother could defend the Panjshir. The Russian army units pulling out of their bases in the former German Democratic Republic after the Berlin Wall came down were selling off everything in their arsenals—rifles, machine guns, mortars, land mines, radios, jeeps, tanks, ammunition. Samat, representing the business interests of someone very powerful, was the middleman. It was a period of my life when I felt no guilt about buying and using these arms. I did to the Taliban what they eventually did to me. That was before I myself walked on a land mine. Take it from someone who has been there, Mr. Odum, it’s an exhilarating experience, stepping on a mine. One instant you are attached to the ground, the next you are defying gravity, flailing away in the air. When you fall back to earth you have one limb less and nothing—not your body, not your mind—is ever the same. It was Samat who arranged for me to be flown to a Moscow hospital. It w
as Samat who came around with my manufactured-in-America artificial leg. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I became another person. Which is why you find me presiding over a warehouse filled with prostheses that we sell at cost.”

  “And where does the name ‘Soft Shoulder’ come from?”

  “Samat and I were traveling in the U.S. once,” Rabbani explained. “We were driving a large American automobile from Santa Fe, in New Mexico, to New York, when we stumbled across the idea of going into the business of exporting artificial limbs at prices that would make them more easily affordable to the victims of war. We had pulled up at the side of the road to urinate when we shook hands on the project. Next to the car was a sign that read ‘Soft Shoulder.’ Neither of us knew what it meant, but we decided it would make a fitting name for our company.”

  The intercom buzzed. Rabbani depressed a lever with a deft jab of a cane and barked irritably, “And what is it now, my girl?”

  Mrs. Rainfield’s voice came over the speaker. “Truck’s here for the Bosnia shipment, Mr. Rabbani. I sent them round back to the loading dock. They gave me a certified bank check for the correct amount.”

  “Call the bank to confirm it issued the check. Meanwhile get Rachid to supervise the loading.” Rabbani tripped the lever closed with his cane, cutting the connection. “Can’t be too vigilant,” he moaned. “Lot of shady dealers make a lot of money peddling prostheses—they are not happy when someone else sells them at cost.” He pried the stub of the cigarette out of his mouth and lobbed it across the room into a metal waste basket. “When were you in Israel, Mr. Odum?”

  “Went there roughly ten days back.”

  “You told Mrs. Rainfield to tell me you knew Samat from Israel. Why did you lie?”

  Martin understood that a lot depended on how he answered the question. “In order to get past the front door,” he said. He angled his head. “What makes you think I was lying?”

  Rabbani pulled an enormous handkerchief from a pocket and wiped the perspiration under his shirt collar at the back of his neck. “Samat left Israel before you got there, my son.”