Legends (51 page)

Martin had to lure Samat into filling in the blanks. “It was the scope of the Prigorodnaia operation that sickened me,” he said. “Nothing like that had ever been attempted before.”

Samat’s head bobbed restlessly; words spilled out, as if the sheer quantity of them filling the air could create a bond between him and the man he knew as Jozef. “When the CIA found my uncle Tzvetan, he was running a used-car dealership in Armenia. What attracted them to him was that his father and grandfather had been executed by the Bolsheviks; his brother, my father, had died in the camps; he him self had spent years in a Siberian prison. Tzvetan detested the Soviet regime and the Russians who ran it. He was ready to do anything to get revenge. So the CIA bankrolled him with their money he cornered the used-car market in Moscow. Then, with the help of CIA largesse, I’m talking hundreds of millions, he branched out into the aluminum business. He made deals with the smelters, he bought three hundred railroad cars, he built a port facility in Siberia to off load alumina. Before long, he had cornered the aluminum market in Russia and amassed a fortune of dozens of billions of dollars. And still his empire grew he dealt in steel and chrome and coal, he bought factories and businesses by the dozens, he opened banks to service the empire and launder the profits abroad. Which is where I came in. Tzvetan trusted me completely I was the only one who understood how the Oligarkb’s empire was configured. It was all here in my head.”

“Then, once Tzvetan had established himself as an economic force, the CIA pushed him into politics.”

“If my uncle ingratiated himself with Yeltsin, it was because he was following Mrs. Quest’s game plan. When Yeltsin wanted to publish his first book, Tzvetan arranged the contracts and bought up the print run. The Yeltsin family suddenly discovered that they held shares in giant enterprises. Thanks to the Oligarkh, Yeltsin became a rich man. When Yeltsin ran for president of the Russian Federation in 1991, Tzvetan financed the campaign. Tzvetan was the one who funded Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard, the Presidential Security Service. It was only natural that when Yeltsin sought advice, he would turn to the leading figure in his inner circle, the Oligarkh.”

Martin began to see where the Prigorodnaia plot was going. “Yeltsin’s disastrous decision to free prices and willy-nilly transform Russia into a free-market economy in the early nineties unleashed hyperinflation and wiped out the pensions and savings of tens of millions of Russians. It threw the country into economic chaos “

“The concept originated with Crystal Quest’s DDO people. My uncle was the one who convinced Yeltsin that a free-market economy would cure Russia’s ills.”

“The privatization of Soviet industrial assets, which looted the country’s wealth and funneled it into the hands of the Oligarkh and a handful of insiders like him “

Samat was scraping his palms together. “It all came from the CIA’s Operations Directorate the hyperinflation, the privatization, even Yeltsin’s decision to attack Chechnya and bog down the Russian army in a war they couldn’t win. You can understand where the Americans were coming from the cold war was over, for sure, but America did not defeat the mighty Soviet Union only to have a mighty Russia rise like a phoenix from its ashes. The people at Langley could not take the risk that the transition from socialism to capitalism might succeed. So they got the Oligarkh, who detested the communist apparatchiki, who was only too happy to see Russia and the Russians sink into an economic swamp, to use his considerable influence on Yeltsin.”

Stella, watching Martin intently, saw him wince. For an instant she thought his leg must be acting up again. Then it dawned on her that the pain came from what Samat was saying: Martin had found the naked truth buried in Samat’s story. She had, too. “The CIA was running Russia!” she exclaimed.

“It was running Russia into the ground,” Martin agreed.

“That was the beauty of it,” Samat said, his voice shrill with jubilation. ” We paid the Russians back for what they did to the Ugor-Zhilovs.”

Martin remembered what Crystal Quest had said to him the day she summoned him to Xing’s Mandarin restaurant under the pool hall. We didn’t hire your conscience, only your brain and your body. And then, one fine day, you stepped out of character -you stepped out of all your characters and took what in popular idiom is called a moral stand.

At the time Martin didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about. Now the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place; now he understood why they’d convened a summit at Langley to decide whether to terminate his contract or his life.

Samat, drained, puffed on the cigarette to calm his nerves. Martin’s found himself staring at the ash at the tip of Samat’s cigarette, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette. Martin associated the ash with the naked man kneeling at the edge of the crater, the one who had been caught in the black-and-white photograph peering over his shoulder, his eyes hollow with terror.

Samat, sucking on the cigarette, became aware of the ash, too. His words slurring with dread, he whispered, “Please. I ask you, Jozef. For the sake of my mother, who loved you like a son. Do not shoot me.”

“I’m not sure you should shoot him,” Stella said. “Then again, I’m not sure you shouldn’t. What is to be accomplished by shooting him?”

“Revenge is a manifestation of sanity. Shooting him would make me feel… perfectly sane.” Martin looked back at Samat, who was breathing noisily through his mouth, terrified that each breath would be his last. “Where is the Oligarktt” Martin asked.

“I do not know.”

Martin raised the Tula-Tokarev to eye level and sighted on Samat’s forehead, directly between his eyes. Stella turned away. “When you lived in Kiryat Arba,” Martin reminded Samat, “you spent a lot of time on the phone with someone who had a 718 area code.”

“The phone records were destroyed. How could you know this?”

“Stella remembered seeing one of your phone bills.”

“I swear to you on my mother’s head, I do not know where the Oligarkh is. The 718 number was the home phone of the American manufacturer of artificial limbs that I imported to London for distribution to war zones.” Tears welled in Samat’s seaweed-green eyes. “For all I know, the Oligarkh may no longer be alive. In the Witness Protection Program, these things are tightly compartmented, precisely so that no one can get to him through me. Or to me through him.”

Stella said, very quietly, “He may be telling the truth.”

Samat clutched at the buoy Stella had thrown him. “I never meant to harm you,” he told her. “The marriage to your sister was a matter of convenience for both of us she wanted to live in Israel and I had to get out of Russia quickly. I was incapable of sleeping with Ya’ara. You have to comprehend. A man can only be a man with a woman.”

“Which narrowed it down to Stella,” Martin said.

Samat avoided his eye. “A normal man has normal appetites…”

Martin held the pistol unwaveringly for several long seconds, then slowly let the front sight drop. “Your other uncle, the one who lives in Caesarea, claims you stole a hundred and thirty million dollars from six of his holding companies. He offered me a million dollars to find you.”

Samat glimpsed salvation. “I will pay you two million not to find me.”

“I don’t accept checks.”

Samat saw that he might be able to worm his way out of this predicament after all. “I have bearer shares hidden in the freezer of the icebox.”

“There is one other matter that needs to be arranged,” Martin informed him.

Confidence began seeping back into Samat’s voice. “Only name it,” he said, all business.

Stella spent the better part of the next morning on Samat’s phone trying to track down an Orthodox rabbi who would accommodate them. An old rabbi in Philadelphia gave her the number of a colleague in Tenafly, New Jersey; a recorded announcement at the Chabad Lubavitch Synagogue there suggested anyone calling with a weekend emergency try the rabbi’s home number, which rang and rang without anyone answering. A rabbi at Beth Hakneses Hachodosh in Rochester knew of a rabbi at Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, New York, who delivered religious divorces, but when Stella dialed the number she fell on a teenage daughter; her father, the rabbi, was away in Israel, she said. He did have a cousin who officiated at B’nai Jacob in Middletown, Pennsylvania. If this was an emergency, Stella could try phoning him. It was the Middletown rabbi who suggested she call Abraham Shulman, the rabbi at the Beth Israel Synagogue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Rabbi Shulman, an affable man with a booming voice, explained to Stella that what she needed was an ad hoc rabbinical board, composed of three Orthodox rabbis, to deliver the scroll of the get and witness the signatures. As luck would have it, he was sitting down to Sunday brunch with two of his colleagues, one from Manhattan, the other from the Bronx, both of them, like Shulman, I Orthodox rabbis. Oh, dear, yes, it was unusual but the rabbinical

I board could witness the signing of the get by the husband even if the wife were not physically present and then forward the document to the wife’s rabbi in Israel for her signature, at which point the divorce

would become final. Rabbi Shulman inquired how long it would take her and the putative husband to reach Crown Heights. Stella told the rabbi they could be there by late afternoon. She jotted down his directions: cross over from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, follow Flatbush Avenue down to Eastern Parkway, then follow Eastern Parkway until you reached Kingston Avenue. The synagogue filled the top three floors of number 745 Eastern Parkway on your left coming from New York, immediately after Kingston Avenue.

The three rabbis, looking somewhat the worse for brunch, were holding court in Shulman’s murky book-lined study on the ground floor under the synagogue. Shulman, the youngest of the three, was clean shaven with apple-shiny cheeks; the two other rabbis had straggly white beards. All three wore black suits and black fedoras propped high on their foreheads; on the two older rabbis it looked perfectly natural, on Shulman it produced a comic effect. “Which of you,” boomed Shulman, looking from Samat to Martin and back to Samat, “is the lucky future ex?”

Martin, one hand gripping the Tula-Tokarev in his jacket pocket, prodded Samat in the spine. “Who would believe,” Samat said under his breath as he shuffled across the thick carpet, “you went to all this trouble to find me for a divorce.”

“Did you say something?” inquired the rabbi to the right of Shulman.

“It is me, the divorcer,” Samat announced.

“What’s the mad rush to divorce?” the third rabbi asked. “Why couldn’t you wait until the shul opens on Monday morning?”

Stella improvised. “He’s booked on a flight to Moscow from Kennedy airport this evening.”

“There are Orthodox rabbis in Moscow,” Shulman noted.

In a bamboo cage set on a wooden stepladder next to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a green bird with a hooked bill and bright red plumes between its eyes hopped onto a higher trapeze and declared, clear as a bell, “Loz im zayn, loz im zayn.”

Rabbi Shulman looked embarrassed. “My parrot speaks Yiddish,” he explained. “Los im zayn means let him be.” He smiled at his colleagues. “Maybe Ha Shem, blessed be his Name, is trying to tell us something.” The rabbi turned back to Samat. “I assume you wouldn’t come all this way without identification.”

Samat handed his Israeli passport to the rabbi.

“You are Israeli?” Shulman said, plainly surprised. “You speak Hebrew?”

“I immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union. I speak Russian.”

“The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore,” Shulman pointed out.

“I meant Russia, of course,” Samat said.

“Excuse me for asking,” the oldest of the three rabbis said, “but you are Jewish?”

“My mother is Jewish, which makes me Jewish. The Israeli immigration authorities accepted the proofs of this when they let me into the country.”

Stella explained the general situation while Shulman took notes. Her sister, whose Israeli name was Ya’ara, daughter of the late Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner of Brooklyn, New York, currently lived in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank called Kiryat Arba. Ya’ara and Samat Ugor-Zhilov, here present, had been married by the Kiryat Arba rabbi, whose name was Ben Zion; Stella herself had been a witness at the marriage ceremony. Samat had subsequently abandoned his wife without granting her a religious divorce. This same Samat, here present, had had second thoughts about the matter and is now willing to put his signature to the document granting a religious divorce to his wife. She stepped forward and handed the rabbis a scrap of paper which spelled out the terms of the divorce. Samat’s signature was scrawled across the bottom.

The resplendent parrot descended to the lower trapeze and cried out, “Nu, shoyn! Nu, shoyn!“Shulman said, “That’s the Yiddish equivalent of Let’s put the show on the road.”

One of the older rabbis looked across the room at Martin. “And who are you?”

“That’s a good question, rabbi,” Martin said.

“Perhaps you would like to answer it,” Shulman suggested.

“My name is Martin Odum.”

Looking straight at Martin, Stella said, “He has deeper layers of identity than a name, rabbi. Fact is, he’s not absolutely sure who he is. But so what women fall for men all the time who don’t know who they are.”

Shulman cleared his throat. The three rabbis bent over Samat’s passport. “The photograph in the passport doesn’t look anything like this gentleman,” one of the rabbis observed.

“I did not have a beard when I came to Israel,” Samat explained.

Stella said, “Look carefully you can tell by the eyes it’s the same man.

“Only women are able to identify men by their eyes,” Shulman remarked. He addressed Samat. “You affirm that you are the Samat Ugor-Zhilov who is married to ” he glanced at his notes “Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov of Kiryat Arba?”

“He does affirm it,” Stella said.

The rabbi favored her with a pained look. “He must speak for himself.”