Legends Read online

  “That’s a strange question. He could cover his head like an Arab—as long as I could see his eyes, I could pick him out of a crowd.”

  “What did he do by way of work?”

  “If you mean work in the ordinary sense of the term, nothing. He’d bought a new split-level house on the edge of Kiryat Arba for cash, or so the rabbi whispered in my ear as we were walking to the synagogue for the wedding ceremony. He owned a brand new Japanese Honda and paid for everything, at least in front of me, with cash. I stayed in Kiryat Arba for ten days and I came back again two years later for ten days, but I never saw him go to the synagogue to study Torah, or to an office like some of the other men in the settlement. There were two telephones and a fax machine in the house and it seemed as if one of them was always ringing. Some days he’d lock himself in the upstairs bedroom and talk on the phone for hours at a stretch. The few times he talked on the phone in front of me he switched to Armenian.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Uh-huh what?”

  “Sounds like one of those new Russian capitalists you read about in the newspapers. Did your sister have children?”

  Stella shook her head. “No. To tell you the awful truth, I’m not positive they ever consummated the marriage.” She slid to the floor and went over to the window to stare out at the street. “The fact is I don’t fault him for leaving her. I don’t think Elena—I never got used to calling her Ya’ara—has the vaguest idea how to please a man. Samat probably ran off with a bleached blonde who gave him more pleasure in bed.”

  Martin, listening listlessly, perked up. “You make the same mistake most women make. If he ran off with another woman, it’s because he was able to give her more pleasure in bed.”

  Stella turned back to gaze at Martin. Her eyes tightened into a narrower squint. “You don’t talk like a detective.”

  “Sure I do. It’s the kind of thing Bogart would have said to convince a client that under the hard boiled exterior resided a sensitive soul.”

  “If that’s what you’re trying to do, it’s working.”

  “I have a question: Why doesn’t your sister get the local rabbi to testify that her husband ran out on her and divorce him in absentia?”

  “That’s the problem,” Stella said. “In Israel a religious woman needs to have a divorce handed down by a religious court before she can go on with her life. The divorce is called a get. Without a get, a Jewish woman remains an agunah, which means a chained woman, unable to remarry under Jewish law; even if she remarries under civil law her children will still be considered bastards. And the only way a woman can obtain a get is for the husband to show up in front of the rabbis of a religious court and agree to the divorce. There’s no other way, at least not for religious people. There are dozens of Hasidic husbands who disappear each year to punish their wives—they go off to America or Europe. Sometimes they live under assumed names. Go find them if you can! Under Jewish law the husband is permitted to live with a woman who’s not his wife, but the wife doesn’t have the same right. She can’t marry again, she can’t live with a man, she can’t have children.”

  “Now I’m beginning to see why you need the services of a detective. How long ago did this Samat character skip out on your sister?”

  “It’ll be two months next weekend.”

  “And it’s only now that you’re trying to hire a detective?”

  “We didn’t know for sure he wasn’t coming back until he didn’t come back. Then we wasted time trying the hospitals, the morgues, the American and Russian embassies in Israel, the local police in Kiryat Arba, the national police in Tel Aviv. We even ran an ad in the newspaper offering a reward for information.” She tossed a shoulder. “I’m afraid we don’t have much experience tracking down missing persons.”

  “You said earlier that your father and you thought Samat might head for America. What made you decide that?”

  “It’s the phone calls. I caught a glimpse once of his monthly phone bill—it was several thousand shekels, which is big enough to put a dent in a normal bank account. I noticed that some of the calls went to the same number in Brooklyn. I recognized the country and area code—1 for America, 718 for Brooklyn—because it’s the same as ours on President Street.”

  “You didn’t by any chance copy down the number?”

  She shook her head in despair. “It didn’t occur to me …”

  “Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t know this Samat character was going to run out on your sister.” He saw her look quickly away. “Or did you?”

  “I never thought the marriage would last. I didn’t see him burying himself in Kiryat Arba for the rest of his life. He was too involved in the world, too dynamic, too attractive—”

  “You found him attractive?”

  “I didn’t say I found him attractive,” she said defensively. “I could see how he might appeal to certain women. But not my sister. She’d never been naked in front of a man in her life. As far as I know she’d never seen a naked man. Even when she saw a fully clothed man she averted her eyes. When Samat looked at a woman he stared straight into her eyes without blinking; he undressed her. He claimed to be a religious Jew but I think now it may have been some kind of cover, a way of getting into Israel, of disappearing into the world of the Hasidim. I never saw him lay tefillin, I never saw him go to the synagogue, I never saw him pray the way religious Jews do four times a day. He didn’t kiss the mezuzah when he came into the house the way my sister did. Elena and Samat lived in different worlds.”

  “You have photographs of him?”

  “When he disappeared, my sister’s photo album disappeared with him. I have one photo I took the day they were married—I sent it to my father, who framed it and hung it over the mantle.” Retrieving her satchel, she pulled a brown envelope from it and carefully extracted a black and white photograph. She stared at it for a moment, the ghost of an anguished smile deforming her lips, then offered it to Martin.

  Martin stepped back and held up his palms. “Did Samat ever touch this?”

  She thought a moment. “No. I had the film developed in the German Colony in Jerusalem and mailed it to my father from the post office across the street from the photo shop. Samat didn’t know it existed.”

  Martin accepted the photo and tilted it toward the daylight. The bride, a pale and noticeably overweight young woman dressed in white satin with a neck-high bodice, and the groom, wearing a starched white shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple and a black suit jacket flung casually over his shoulders, stared impassively into the camera. Martin imagined Stella crying out the Russian equivalent of “Cheese” to pry a smile out of them, but it obviously hadn’t worked; the body language—the bride and groom were standing next to each other but not touching—revealed two strangers at a wake, not a husband and wife after a wedding ceremony. Samat’s face had all but disappeared behind a shaggy black beard and mustache. Only his eyes, storm-dark with anger, were visible. He was obviously irritated, but at what? The religious ceremony that had gone on too long? The prospect of marital bliss in a West Bank oubliette with a consenting Lubavitcher for cellmate?

  “How tall is your sister?” Martin inquired.

  “Five foot four. Why?”

  “He’s slightly taller, which would make him five foot six or seven.”

  “Mind if I ask you something?” Stella said.

  “Ask, ask,” Martin said impatiently.

  “How come you’re not taking notes?”

  “There’s no reason to. I’m not taking notes because I’m not taking the case.”

  Stella’s heart sank. “For God’s sake, why? My father’s ready to pay you whether you find him or not.”

  “I’m not taking the case,” Martin announced, “because it’d be easier to find a needle in a field of haystacks than your sister’s missing husband.”

  “You could at least try,” Stella groaned.

  “I’d be wasting your father’s money and my time. Look, Russian revolutionaries at
the turn of the century grew beards like your sister’s husband. It’s a trick illegals have used since Moses dispatched spies to explore the enemy order of battle at Jericho. You live with the beard long enough, people identify you with the beard. The day you want to disappear, you do what the Russian revolutionaries did—you shave it off. Your own wife couldn’t pick you out of a police lineup afterward. For argument’s sake, let’s say Samat was one of those gangster capitalists you hear so much about these days. Maybe things got too hot for your future ex-brother-in-law in Moscow the year he turned up in Kiryat Arba to marry your half sister. Chechen gangs, working out of that monster of a hotel across from the Kremlin—it’s called the Rossiya, if I remember right—were battling the Slavic Alliance to see who would control the lucrative protection rackets in the capital. There were shootouts every day as the gangs fought over territories. Witnesses to the shootouts were gunned down before they could go to the police. People going to work in the morning discovered men hanging by their necks from lampposts. Maybe Samat is Jewish, maybe he’s an Armenian Apostolic Christian. It doesn’t really matter. He buys a birth certificate certifying his mother is Jewish—they’re a dime a dozen on the black market—and applies to get into Israel. The paperwork can take six or eight months, so to speed things up your brother-in-law has a rabbi arrange a marriage with a female Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. It’s the perfect cover story, the perfect way to disappear from view until the gang wars in Moscow peter out. From his split level safe house in a West Bank settlement, he keeps in touch with his business partners; he buys and sells stocks, he arranges to export Russian raw materials in exchange for Japanese computers or American jeans. And then one bright morning, when things in Russia have calmed down, he decides he’s had enough of his Israeli dungeon. He doesn’t want his wife or the rabbis or the state of Israel asking him where he’s going, or looking him up when he gets there, so he grabs his wife’s photo album and shaves off his beard and, slipping out of Israel, disappears from the face of the planet earth.”

  Stella’s lips parted as she listened to Martin’s scenario. “How do you know so much about Russia and the gang wars?”

  He shrugged. “If I told you I’m not sure how I know these things, would you believe me?”

  “No.”

  Martin retrieved her raincoat from the banister. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.”

  “I didn’t waste it,” she said quietly. “I know more now than when I came in.” She accepted the raincoat and fitted her arms into the sleeves and pulled it tightly around her body against the emotional gusts that would soon chill her to the bone. Almost as an afterthought, she produced a ballpoint pen from her pocket and, taking his palm, jotted a 718 telephone number on it. “If you change your mind …”

  Martin shook his head. “Don’t hold your breath.”

  The mountain of dirty dishes in the sink had grown too high even for Martin. His sleeves rolled up to the elbows, he was working his way through the first stack when the telephone sounded in the pool parlor. As usual he took his sweet time answering; in his experience it was the calls you took that complicated your life. When the phone continued ringing, he ambled into the pool room and, drying his hands on his chinos, pinned the receiver to an ear with a shoulder.

  “Leave a message if you must,” he intoned.

  “Listen up, Dante—” a woman barked.

  A splitting headache surged against the backs of Martin’s eye sockets. “You have a wrong number,” he muttered, and hung up.

  Almost instantly the telephone rang again. Martin pressed the palm with the phone number written on it to his forehead and stared at the telephone for what seemed like an eternity before deciding to pick it up.

  “Dante, Dante, you don’t want to go and hang up on me. Honestly you don’t. It’s not civilized. For God’s sake, I know it’s you.”

  “How did you find me?” Martin asked.

  The woman on the other end of the line swallowed a laugh. “You’re on the short list of ex-agents we keep track of,” she said. Her voice turned serious. “I’m downstairs, Dante. In a booth at the back of the Chinese restaurant. I’m faint from the monosodium glutamate. Come on down and treat yourself to something from column B on me.”

  Martin took a deep breath. “They say that dinosaurs roamed the earth sixty-five million years ago. You’re living proof that some of them are still around.”

  “Sticks and stones, Dante. Sticks and stones.” She added, in a tight voice, “A word of advice: You don’t want to not come down. Honestly you don’t.”

  The line went dead in his ear.

  Moments later Martin found himself passing the window filled with plucked ducks hanging from meat hooks and pushing through the heavy glass door into Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant under the pool parlor. Tsou Xing, who happened to be his landlord, was holding fort as usual on the high stool behind the cash register. He waved his only arm in Martin’s direction. “Hello to you,” the old man called in a high pitched voice. “You want to eat in or take out, huh?”

  “I’m meeting someone …” He surveyed the dozen or so clients in the long narrow restaurant and saw Crystal Quest in a booth near the swinging doors leading to the kitchen. Quest was better known to a generation of CIA hands as Fred because of an uncanny resemblance to Fred Astaire; a story had once made the rounds claiming that the president of the United States, spotting her at an intelligence briefing in the Oval Office, had passed a note to an aide demanding to know why a drag queen was representing the CIA. Now Quest, a past master of tradecraft, had positioned herself with her back to the tables, facing a mirror in which she could keep track of who came and went. She watched Martin approach in the mirror.

  “You look fit as a flea, Dante,” she said as he slid onto the banquette facing her. “What’s your secret?”

  “I sprang for a rowing machine,” he said.

  “How many hours do you put in a day?”

  “One in the morning before breakfast. One in the middle of the night when I wake up in a cold sweat.”

  “Why would someone with a clean conscience wake up in a cold sweat? Don’t tell me you’re still brooding over the death of that whore in Beirut, for God’s sake.”

  Martin brought a hand up to his brow, which continued to throb. “I think of her sometimes but that’s not what’s bothering me. If I knew what was waking me up, maybe I’d sleep through the night.”

  Fred, a lean woman who had risen through the ranks to become the CIA’s first female Deputy Director of Operations, was wearing one of her famous pantsuits with wide lapels and a dress shirt with frills down the front. Her hair, as usual, was cropped short and dyed the color of rust to conceal the gray streaks that came to topsiders who worried themselves sick, so Fred always claimed, over Standard Operating Procedure: Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

  “What’s your pleasure, Dante?” Fred asked, pushing aside a half eaten dinner, fingering her frozen daiquiri, noisily crunching chips of ice between her teeth as she regarded her guest through bloodshot eyes.

  Martin signaled with a chopstick and then worked it back and forth between his fingers. At the bar, Tsou Xing poured him a whiskey, neat. A slim young Chinese waitress with a tight skirt slit up one thigh brought it over.

  Martin said, “Thanks, Minh.”

  “You ought to eat something, Martin,” the waitress said. She noticed him toying with the chopstick. “Chinese say man with one chopstick die of starvation.”

  Smiling, he dropped the chopstick on the table. “I’ll take an order of Peking duck with me when I leave.”

  Fred watched the girl slink away in the mirror. “Now that’s what I call a great ass, Dante. You getting any?”

  “What about you, Fred?” he asked pleasantly. “People still screwing you?”

  “They try,” she retorted, her facial muscles drawn into a tight smile, “in both senses of the word.
But nobody succeeds.”

  Snickering, Martin extracted a Beedie from the tin and lit it with one of the restaurant’s matchbooks on the table. “You didn’t say how you found me.”

  “I didn’t, did I? It’s more a case of we never lost you. When you washed up like a chunk of jetsam over a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, alarums, not to mention excursions, sounded in the battleship-gray halls of the shop. We obtained a copy of the lease the day you signed it. Mind you, nobody was surprised to find you’d slipped into the Martin Odum legend. What could be more logical? He’d actually been raised on Eastern Parkway, he went to PS 167, Crown Heights was his stamping ground, his father had an electric appliance store on Kingston Avenue. Martin even had a school chum whose father owned the Chinese restaurant on Albany Avenue. Martin Odum was the legend you worked up on my watch, or have you misplaced that little detail? Now that I think of it, you were the last agent I personally ran before they kicked me upstairs to run the officers who ran the agents, although, even at one remove, I always considered that I was the person playing you. Funny part is I have no memory of Odum being a detective. You must have decided the legend needed embroidering.”

  Martin assumed that they had bugged the pool parlor. “Being a detective beats having to work for a living.”

  “What kind of cases do you get?”

  “Mahjongg debts. Angry wives who pay me for photographs of errant husbands caught in the act. Hasidic fathers who think their sons may be dating girls who don’t keep kosher. Once I was hired by the family of a Russian who died in Little Odessa, which is the part of Brooklyn where most of the Russians who wind up in America live, because they were convinced the Chechens who ran the neighborhood crematorium were extracting gold teeth from the late lamented before cremating their bodies. Another time I was hired by a colorful Little Odessa political figure to bring back the Rottweiler that’d been kidnapped by his ex-wife when he fell behind on alimony payments.”

  “You get a lot of work in Little Odessa.”