The rabbi bounded to his feet when the women appeared at the door; Ya’ara stopped to kiss the mezuzah before she came in. Grabbing one of her hands in both of his, bending at the waist so that his head was level with hers, the rabbi bombarded her with a burst of Hebrew which, to the shamus’s ear, sounded more Brooklyn than biblical. Martin concluded that the rabbi was offering condolences because Ya’ara started sobbing again; tears cascaded down her cheeks and soaked into the tightly buttoned collar of her blouse. Ben Zion led Ya’ara to the yortseit candle and, rocking back and forth on the soles of his sneakers, started praying in Hebrew. Ya’ara, blotting her tears on the back of a sleeve, joined in.
“Aren’t you going to pray for your father?” Martin whispered to Stella.
“I only pray for the living,” she retorted fiercely.
When the prayer ended the rabbi excused himself to organize the Sabbath pilgrimage to the Cave of Machpela, and Martin got his first opportunity to talk to Stella’s sister. “I’m sorry about your father,” he began.
She accepted this with a shy closing of her lids. “I was not expecting him to die, and certainly not of a heart attack. He had the heart of a lion. After all he had been through—” She shrugged weakly.
“Your sister has hired me to find Samat so that you can get a religious divorce.”
Ya’ara turned on Stella. “What good will a divorce do me?”
“It is a matter of pride,” Stella insisted. “You can’t let him get away with this.”
Martin steered the conversation back to matters of tradecraft. “Do you have anything of his—a book he once read, a telephone he once used, a bottle of alcohol he once poured a drink from, a toothbrush even? Anything at all?”
Ya’ara shook her head. “There was stationery with a London letterhead but it disappeared and I don’t remember the address on it. Samat filled a trunk with personal belongings and paid two boys to carry it down to the taxi when he left. He even took the photographs of our wedding. The only photograph left of him was the one Stella snapped after the ceremony and sent to our father.” At the mention of their father, tears trickled down her cheeks again. “How could Samat do this to a wife, I ask you?”
“Stella told me he was always talking on the phone,” Martin said. “Did he initiate the calls or did people call him?”
“Both.”
“So there must be phone records showing the numbers he dialed.”
Again she shook her head. “The rabbi asked the security office here to try and get the phone numbers. Someone even drove to Tel Aviv to interview the phone company. He reported back that the numbers were all on a magnetic tape that had been erased by error. There was no trace of the numbers he called.”
“What language did he use when he spoke on the phone?”
“English. Russian. Armenian sometimes.”
“Did you ever ask him what he did for a living?”
“Once.”
Stella said, “What did he say?”
“At first he didn’t answer. When I pressed him, he told me he ran a business selling Western-manufactured artificial limbs to people who had lost legs to Russian land mines in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kurdistan. He said he could have made a fortune but was selling them at cost.”
“And you believed him?” Stella asked.
“I had no reason not to.” Ya’ara’s eyes suddenly widened. “Someone once called when he wasn’t here and left a phone number for him to call back. I thought it might have something to do with these artificial limbs and wrote it down on the first thing that came to hand, which was the back of a recipe, and then copied it onto the pad next to the telephone. I tore off the page and gave it to Samat when he returned to the house that day and he went to the bedroom and dialed a number. I remember that the conversation was very agitated. At one point Samat was even yelling into the phone, and he kept switching from English to Russian and back to English again.”
“The recipe,” Stella said softly. “Do you still have it?”
Both Stella and Martin could see Ya’ara hesitate. “You would not be betraying your husband,” Martin said. “If and when we find him, we are only going to make sure you get the famous get so you can go on with your life.”
“Samat owes that much to you,” Stella said.
Sighing, moving as if her limbs were weighted down by gravity, Ya’ara pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen alcove and pulled a tin box from one of the wall cupboards. She carried it back to the living room, set it on the folding table, opened the lid and began thumbing through printed recipes that she had torn out of Elle magazine over the years. She pulled the one for apple strudel out of the box and turned it over. A phone number starting with the country code 44 and city code 171 was scrawled on the back in pencil. Martin produced a felt tipped pen and copied the number into a small notebook.
“Where is that?” Stella asked Martin.
“Forty-four is England, 171 is London,” he said. He turned back to Stella. “Did Samat ever leave Kiryat Arba?” he asked.
“Once, sometimes twice a week, he drove off by himself, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for several days.”
“Do you have any idea where he went?”
“The one time I asked him he told me it was not the business of a wife to keep track of a husband.”
Stella looked brightly at Martin. “We went with him once, Martin.” She smiled at her half sister. “Don’t you remember, Elena—”
“My name is Ya’ara now,” Stella’s sister reminded her coldly.
Stella was not put off. “It was when I came for the wedding,” she said excitedly. “I had to be at Ben-Gurion Airport at seven in the evening for my flight back to New York. Samat was going somewhere for lunch. He said if we didn’t mind killing time, he had to see someone on the coast and could drop me at the airport on the way back to Kiryat Arba.”
“I remember that,” Ya’ara said. “We made bologna sandwiches and packed them in a paper bag and took a plastic bottle of apple juice.” She sighed again. “That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she added.
Stella said to Martin, “He drove north from Tel Aviv along the expressway and got off at the exit marked ‘Caesarea.’ There was a labyrinth of streets but he never hesitated, he seemed to know his way around very well. He dropped us on the edge of the sand dunes near some A-frame houses. We could see those giant chimneys down the coast that produced electricity.”
Ya’ara’s face lit up for the first time in Martin’s presence; the smile almost made her look handsome. “I wore an enormous straw hat to protect my face from the sun,” she recalled. “We ate in the shade of a eucalyptus tree and then hunted for Roman coins in the sand.”
“And what did Samat do while you were scouring the dunes for Roman coins?” Martin asked.
The girls looked at each other. “He never told us. He picked us up at the A-frames at five-thirty and dropped me off at the airport at six-forty.”
“Uh-huh,” Martin said, his brows knitting as he began to fit the first blurred pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place.
Martin took a tiny address book (tradecraft ruled: Everyone in it was identified by nickname and phone numbers were masked in a simple cipher) from his pocket and used his AT&T card to call Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant (listed in the address book as “Glutamate”) under the pool parlor on Albany Avenue in Crown Heights. Given the time difference, Tsou would be presiding from the high stool behind the cash register, glowering at the waitress who had replaced Minh if she failed to push the more expensive dishes on the menu. “Peking duck hanging in window for two days,” he’d once informed Minh, his gold teeth glistening with saliva, his face a mask of earnestness (so she had gleefully recounted to Martin), “is aphlodisiac, good for elections.”