“I was the conducting officer in charge of the investigation into the Oligarkh’s affairs.”
Martin saw where the story was going. “I’ll take a wild guess—he paid off the Sixth Directorate.”
Kastner didn’t respond for a moment. “You have to put yourself in our shoes,” he said finally. “We were honest cops and we went after him in a straightforward manner. But he bought the minister in the Kremlin who ran the KGB, then he bought my colleague who was the head of the Sixth Chief Directorate, and then he turned to me and put a thick packet of money on the table, this at a time when we sometimes went several months without drawing a salary because of the economic chaos. What was I to do? If I accepted I would be on his payroll. If I refused I would seriously compromise my life expectancy.”
“So you defected to America.”
Kastner plucked his cigarette from the saucer and inhaled deeply, then sniffed at the smoke in the air. “It was the only solution,” he said.
“Knowing what you knew about uncle Ugor-Zhilov, why did you agree to let your daughter marry his nephew Samat?”
Stella came to her father’s defense. “Kastner agreed because he didn’t have a choice.”
Kastner said, very quietly, “You do not understand how things worked after communism collapsed. One morning there arrived in my mailbox downstairs here on President Street a letter typed on expensive bonded paper. It was not signed but I immediately understood where it came from. The writer said that his nephew was obliged to leave Russia, and quickly. It said that the best place for him to go would be Israel. It was a time when Jews were queuing up by the tens of thousands for visas at the Israeli embassy in Moscow; the Israeli Mossad, fearful that what was left of the KGB apparatus would try to infiltrate agents into Israel, was screening the Jewish applicants very carefully. And carefully meant slowly. Ugor-Zhilov obviously knew that my daughter Elena had joined the Lubavitch sect soon after we settled in Crown Heights. He knew that the Lubavitchers had a lot of influence when it came to getting Jews into Israel—they could arrange for the Israeli immigration authorities to speed things up if there was a Lubavitch marriage involved, especially if the newlyweds planned to live in one of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which the Israeli government at the time was eager to populate.”
Martin felt claustrophobic in the airless closet; he had a visceral revulsion for closed spaces without windows. “Something doesn’t make sense here,” he said, eyeing the door, mastering an urge to throw it open. “How could Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov send a letter to you if you were in the FBI’s witness protection—”
Martin’s mouth sagged open; the answer to his question came to him before Kastner supplied it.
“It was because he was able to send a letter to me,” Kastner said, “despite my being in the FBI program, that it was out of the realm of possibility to refuse him. Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov is one of the richest men in all of Russia; one of the fifty richest men in the world, according to that article in Time. He has a long arm, long enough to reach someone who has been given a new identity and lives on President Street in Crown Heights.” He glanced at Stella and the two exchanged grim smiles. “Long enough,” Kastner continued, “to reach his two beautiful girls, also. When the Oligarkh asks for a favor, it is not healthy to refuse if you are confined to a wheel chair and have nowhere else to defect to.”
Martin remembered the words from the Bob Dylan song he’d heard in the street and he repeated them aloud: “Not much is really sacred.”
“Not true,” Kastner burst out. “Many things are still sacred. Protecting my daughters is at the top of the list.”
“Kastner could not be expected to anticipate how Samat would mistreat Elena,” Stella put in. “It was not his fault—”
Kastner cut her off. “Whose fault was it if not mine?” he said despondently.
“Aren’t you running a risk by hiring me to find this Samat?”
“I only want him to give my Elena the religious divorce so she can marry again. What he does with his life after that is his affair. Surely this is not an unreasonable request.” Kastner worked the joystick, backing the wheelchair into the wall with a light thud. He shrugged his heavy shoulders as if he were trying to rid himself of a weight. “In terms of money, how do we organize this?”
“I pay my way with credit cards. When the credit card people ask me for money, I will ask you to pay my expenses. If I find Samat and your daughter gets her get, we’ll figure out what that’s worth to you. If I don’t find him, you’ll be out of pocket my expenses. Nothing more.”
“In your pool parlor you spoke of the problem of searching for a needle in a field of haystacks,” Stella said. “Where on earth do you begin looking for it?”
“Everyone is somewhere,” Martin informed her. “We’ll start in Israel.”
Stella, startled, said, “We?”
Martin nodded. “First off, there’s your sister—she’ll trust me more if you’re with me when I meet her. Then there’s Samat. Someone on the run can easily change his appearances—the color and length of his hair, for instance. He could even pass himself off as an Arab and cover his head with a kaffiyeh. I need to have someone with me who could pick him out of a crowd if she only saw his seaweed-green eyes.”
“That more or less narrows it down to me,” Stella agreed.
1997: MINH SLEEPWALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS
DRESSED IN LOOSE-FITTING SILK PANTS AND A HIGH-NECKED SILK blouse with a dragon embroidered on the back, Minh was clearing away the last of the dirty lunch dishes when Tsou Xing poked his head through the kitchen doors and asked her if she would run upstairs and check Martin’s beehives. He would do it himself, he said, but he was expecting a delivery of Formosan beer and wanted to count the cartons before they stored them in the cellar to make sure he wasn’t being short changed. Sure, Minh said. No problem. She opened the cash register and retrieved Martin’s keys and headed for the street, glad to have a few minutes to herself. She wondered if Tsou suspected that she had slept with Martin. She thought she’d spotted something resembling a leer in his old eyes when Tsou raised the subject of their upstairs’ neighbor earlier that week; he had been speaking in English but had referred to Martin using the Chinese word for hermit. Where you think yin shi goes when he goes? Tsou had asked. Minh had hunched her muscular shoulders into a shrug. It’s not part of my job to keep track of the customers, she’d replied testily. No reason climb on high horse, Tsou had said, whisking a fly from the bar with the back of his only hand. Not a crime to think you could know, okay? And he had smiled so wickedly that the several gold teeth in his mouth flashed into view. Well, I don’t know and I couldn’t care less, Minh had insisted. Pivoting on a heel, she had stalked off so Tsou would get the message: She didn’t appreciate his sticking his nose into her love life, or lack of same.
Now Minh rubbed her sleeve across the private-eye logo on Martin’s front door to clean the rain stains off of it, then let herself in and, taking the steps two at a time, climbed to the pool parlor. Actually, she did wonder where Martin had gone off to; wondered, too, why he hadn’t left a message for her as well as Tsou. She attributed it to Martin’s shyness; he would have been mortified if he thought Tsou had gotten wind of their relationship, assuming you could call their very occasional evenings together a relationship. She meandered through the pool parlor, brushing her fingers over his Civil War guns and the folders on his desk and the unopened cartons that contained heaven knows what. Soon after he’d moved in she had asked him if he wanted help opening them. He’d kicked at one of the cartons and had said he didn’t need to open them, he knew what was inside. The reply struck her as being very in character.