Legends (23 page)

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 was 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.”

“How do you know that?”

The old man shrugged his bony shoulders. “I will not ask you how you know what you know. Do me the courtesy of not asking me how I know what I know. Samat fled from Israel. If you came knocking on my door today, it is because you somehow found a record of his phone conversations and traced the calls he made to this address in London, despite the fact that these phone records were supposed to have been destroyed. I will not ask you how you did that the phone company is not permitted to reveal addresses corresponding to unlisted numbers.”

“Why did you let me in if you knew I was lying about Samat?”

“I calculated if you were clever enough to find me, you might be clever enough to lead me to Samat.”

“Join the queue, Mr. Rabbani. It seems as if everyone I meet wants to find Samat.”

“They want to find Samat in order to kill him. I want to find him in order to save his life.”

“Do you know why he fled Israel?”

“Certainly I know. He fled from Israel for the same reason he fled to Israel. Chechen hit men were after him. Have been since the Great Mob Wars in Moscow. Samat works for the Oligarkh you’re smart, I’ll give you that, but not so smart that you’ve heard of him.”

Martin couldn’t resist. “Samat’s uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov.”

The old man cackled until the laugh turned into a grating cough. Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. He dabbed at it with the handkerchief as he gasped for breath. “You are a smart one. Do you know what happened during the Great Mob War?”

“The Slavic Alliance battled the Chechen gangs. Over territory. Over who controlled what.”

“At the height of the war the Chechens had about five hundred fighters working out of the Rossiya Hotel not far from the Kremlin. The leader of the Chechens was known by his nom de guerre, which was the Ottoman. The Oligarkh arranged to have him and his lady friend at the time kidnapped. Samat was sent to negotiate with the Chechens if they wanted their leader back they would have to abandon Moscow and settle for some of the smaller cities that the Oligarkh was willing to cede to them. The Chechens said they needed to discuss the matter with the others. Samat decided they were playing for time even if they agreed, there was no guarantee they would give up

Moscow. He persuaded the Oligarkh that the Chechens needed to be taught a lesson. Next morning people going to work found the body of the Ottoman and his lady friend hanging upside down from a lamppost near the Kremlin wall newspapers compared it to the death of Mussolini and his mistress in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War.”

“And you call Samat a philanthropist?”

“We all of us have many sides, my son. That was one side of Samat. The other was selling prostheses at cost to provide limbs to land-mine victims. I was one person before I stepped on the land mine and another after. What about you, Mr. Odum? Are you one dimensional or do you have multiple personalities like the rest of us?”

Martin brought a hand up to his forehead to contain the migraine throbbing like the trains pulling into and out of the station. Across the room the old man carefully pulled another cigarette from a desk drawer and lit it with a wooden match, which he ignited with a flick of his fingernail. Once again the smog of a rain cloud rose over his head. “Who is paying you to find Samat, Mr. Odum?”

Martin explained about the wife Samat had abandoned in Israel; how she needed to find her husband so he could grant her a religious divorce in front of a rabbinical court. Puffing away on his cigarette, Rabbani thought about this. “Not like Samat to abandon a wife like that,” he decided. “If he ran for it, it means the Chechens tracked him to that Jew colony next to Hebron. Chechens have long knives and long memories I’ve been told some of them carry photographs cut from the newspapers of the Ottoman and his lady hanging upside down from a Moscow lamppost. The Chechens must have been knocking on Samat’s door, figuratively speaking, for him to cut and run.” Rabbani hauled open another drawer and retrieved a metal box, which he opened with a key attached to the fob of the gold watch in his vest pocket. He took out a wad of English bank notes and dropped them on the edge of the desk nearest Martin. “I would like to find Samat before the Chechens catch up with him. I would like to help him. He does not need money he has access to all the money he could ever want. But he does need friends. I could arrange for him to disappear into a new identity; into a new life even. So will you work for me, Mr. Odum? Will you find Samat and tell him that Taletbek Rabbani stands ready to come to the assistance of his friend?”

“If Samat is being hunted by the Chechens, helping him could come back to haunt you.”

Rabbani reached for one of the canes and tapped it against his false limb. “I owe Samat my leg. And my leg has become my life. A Panjshiri never turns his back on such a debt, my son.”

Martin pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the desk and fanned the stack of banknotes as if it were a deck of cards. Then he collected them and shoved them into a pocket. “I hope you are going to tell me where to start to look.”

The old man picked up the pencil, scratched something on the back of an envelope and handed it to Martin. “Samat came here after he left Israel he wanted to touch base with the projects to which he was especially attached. He stayed two days, then took a plane to Prague. There is an affiliate in Prague another one of Samat’s pet projects that’s doing secret work for him on the side. I met one of the directors, a Czech woman, when she came here to see Samat. She gave me her card in case I ever visited Prague.”

“What kind of secret work?”

“Not sure. I overheard the woman talking with Samat the project had something to do with trading the bones of a Lithuanian saint for sacred Jewish Torah scrolls. Don’t ask what the bones of a saint have to do with Torah scrolls. I don’t know. Samat was very compartmented The Samat I knew exported prostheses at cost. There were other Samats that I only caught glimpses of one of them was concocting a scheme at the address I gave you in Prague.”

Martin glanced at the paper, then held out a hand. Rabbani’s bony fingers, soft with paraffin-colored skin, gripped his as if he didn’t want him to leave. Words barely recognizable as human speech bubbled up from the old man’s larynx. “I see things from the perspective of someone who is knocking at death’s door. Apocalypse is just around the corner, my son. You are looking at me as if I belong in an asylum, Mr. Odum. I am in an asylum. So come to think of it are you. Western civilization, or what is left of it, is one big asylum. The happy few who understand this are more often than not diagnosed as crazy and hidden away in lunatic bins.”