Legends (50 page)

“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 Klick, told me.”

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

“This Felix Klick 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. Klick’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 Klick’s reference to the insect bite.” “I noticed.” “And?”

“Klick’s the guy who suggested your father hire me to find Samat. Klick 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. Klick must have known Fred didn’t want Samat found. And now Klick’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 wet work 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. ” 7vi,” 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 and 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.”

Stella leaned forward. She was beginning to grasp why Martin considered himself to be imperfectly sane. “Who tortured you?” she asked in a whisper.

“The men in striped shirts,” Martin said. “The ex-paratroopers who guarded trie dacha in Prigorodnaia, who brought me across the river …” He eyed Samat. “I remember the cigarettes being stubbed out on my body. I remember the large safety pin attached to a fragment of cardboard bearing the words The spy Kafkor being passed through the flesh between my shoulder blades. I remember being brought across the Lesnia with all the road workers gaping at me. I remember the guards prodding me up the incline to the crater that had been gouged into the spur of road.”

Samat started hyperventilating. When he could speak again, he said, “I beg you to believe me, Jozef, I would have saved you if it had been within the realm of possibility.”

“Instead you gave Kafkor the spy a last cigarette.”

“You do remember!”

Stella looked from one to the other; she could almost hear her father instructing her that in the life of espionage operatives, questions would always outnumber answers.

Samat started to reach into a cardigan. Martin thumbed back the hammer on the handgun. The click reverberated through the room. Samat froze. “I absolutely must smoke a cigarette,” he said weakly. He held the cardigan open and reached very slowly into an inside pocket and extracted a pack of Marlboro?:. Pulling one cigarette free, he struck a wooden match and brought the flame to the end of the cigarette. His hand shook and he had to grip his wrist with the other hand to steady it and hold the flame to the cigarette. Sucking it into life, he held it away from his body between his thumb and third finger and watched the smoke spiral up toward the overhead light fixture. “What else do you remember, Jozef?”

Martin could almost hear the husky voice of the Russian interrogator, who went by the legend Arkhip Cheklachvili. He repeated what Cheklachvili had told him back in Moscow; at moments his own voice and that of the interrogator overlapped in his head. “Prigorodnaias tractor repairman drove me to Moscow in the village’s tow truck. His intention was to take me to a hospital. At a red light on the Ring Road, not far from the American Embassy, I leaped from the cab of the truck and disappeared in the darkness.”

“Yes, yes, it all fits,” Samat blurted out. “Mrs. Quest sent us word… she told my uncle Tzvetan and me… that the FBI counterintelligence people stationed at the Moscow Embassy found you wandering in the back streets off the Ring Road. She said you couldn’t remember who you were or what had happened to you… she spoke of a trauma… she said it was better for everyone if you couldn’t remember. Oh, you fooled them, Jozef.” Samat started to whimper, tears glistening on his skeletal cheeks. “If she had suspected you of remembering, you would not have been permitted to leave Moscow alive.”

“I sensed that. I knew everything depended on convincing her I was suffering from amnesia.”

“It was the Oligarkh who ordered them to torture you,” Samat said with sudden vehemence. “He was convinced you had betrayed the Prigorodnaia operation. He needed to know to whom. Mrs. Quest needed to know to whom. It was a matter of damage control. If rot had set in, we needed to burn it out, so my uncle said. I tried to reason with him, Jozef. I told him you might have denounced the operation when you came to realize what it consisted of but only to people on the inside. Only to Crystal Quest. I swore you would never go to the newspapers or the authorities. I told him you could be brought around to see things from our point of view. After all, we all worked for the same organization, didn’t we? We all marched to the same music. It wasn’t our business to pass judgment on the operation. The CIA gave us a compass heading and off we went. You were a soldier like me, like my uncle; you were the link between us and Mrs. Quest; between us and Langley.”