“The answer is complicated—”
“Simplify.”
Martin decided to stick close to the truth. “Pippen was a pseudonym I used years ago when I worked as a freelance explosive expert. Odum is the name I’ve been using since.”
Akim brightened. “Pseudonyms are something I can relate to. In Soviet Russia, everybody who was anybody used them. You have heard of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov? He was known as Lenin, after the River Lena in Siberia. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the alias Stalin, which meant steel, which is how he wanted people to think of him. Lev Davidovich Bronstein escaped from prison with the help of a passport made out in the name of one of his jailers, a certain Trotsky. Me myself, I managed to avoid being sent with my two brothers to the gulag by adopting the identity of a sleight-of-hand magician named Melor Semyonovich Zhitkin. You are familiar with the gulag? That’s where temperatures fall below minus fifty and alcohol freezes and you suck on vodka icicles carefully so they do not stick to your tongue. Using the name Melor was a stroke of genius, even if it is me who says so. Melor is a Soviet name, stands for Marx-Engels-Lenin-Organizers-of-Revolution, which made the KGB think I was a diehard communist. I was diehard all right,” he added with a sinister cackle. “They could not kill me, which is what made me diehard.”
Without blinking one of his heavy lids or narrowing his eyes, Akim’s expression turned hard. Martin wondered how he did it. Perhaps it was the shadows playing on his face, perhaps the pupils of his eyes had actually grown smaller. Whatever it was, the effect was chilling.
Akim’s voice shed its laziness. “Pippen was an agent for the American Central Intelligence Agency who infiltrated the Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley posing as a freelance explosive expert with connections to the IRA. You and the CIA are said to have parted company, though I am embarrassed to say none of my sources knows why. You are startled to see how well informed I am, right? You see, in Israel, as in every civilized country, information can be purchased as easily as toothpaste. Now you claim to be a Brooklyn, New York, detective named Odum. There are some who think this is simply another fabricated identity. There are others who say Odum is who you were before you were Pippen.”
“I did work for the CIA once. I no longer do. Odum is as close to the real me as I can get.”
Akim accepted this with a wary nod. “Time for my insulin shot,” he announced. He beckoned with a pinky bearing a heavy gold ring with a diamond set into it. Martin followed him down the narrow steps and across the lawn, past the swimming pool where three women in diaphanous dresses with low necklines were playing mahjongg; he suddenly longed for the days when he investigated uncomplicated things like mahjongg debts and kidnapped dogs and Chechen-run crematoriums in Little Odessa. He must have been off his rocker to think he could trace a husband who had jumped ship. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child’s play by comparison. Akim reached the shaded veranda behind the mansion and motioned Martin to one of the deck chairs. Two of Akim’s Armenians, wearing sports jackets that didn’t conceal the automatic pistols in their shoulder holsters, stood nearby. A male nurse dressed in a white hospital smock was squirting liquid through a needle to expel any air left in the syringe. Akim collapsed into a deck chair and tugged the tails of his shirt out of his trousers to bare a bulging stomach. He sipped fresh orange juice through a plastic straw as the male nurse jabbed the needle under his dry skin and injected the insulin.
“Thanks a lot, Earl. See you tomorrow morning.”
“My pleasure, Mr. Zhitkin.”
When the male nurse was out of ear shot, Akim said, “As you can see I still use the name Zhitkin from time to time. Funny how you become attached to an alias that saved your life.” At the pool, one of the women shrieked with pleasure. Akim burst out angrily, “Keep it quiet, ladies. Don’t you see I have a visitor?” Massaging the spot on his stomach where the insulin had been injected, he said, “So what do you think I can do for you, Mr. Pippen or Mr. Odum or whatever your name is today?”
“I really am a detective,” Martin said. “I was hired to find your nephew, Samat, who seems to have skipped out on his wife. I was hoping you would tell me where to start looking.”
“What’s she want, the wife, alimony payments? A piece of his bank account, assuming he has got a bank account? What?”
“I was hired by the wife’s sister and father—”
“Who is a dead man now.”
“You are well informed. They hired me to find Samat and get him to give her a divorce. She’s religious. Without the divorce she can’t marry again, can’t have children with another man.”
Akim tucked the tails of his shirt back into his trousers. “You have met the wife in question?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You have seen how she dresses? Who would marry her? Who would fuck her even to have children?”
“She’s young. She may even be a virgin. The rabbi who married her thinks she and Samat never slept together.”
Akim waved his hand in disgust. “Rabbi needs to stick to the bible. I do not want to hear private things about my nephew. Who he fucks—whether he fucks—is not my business.”
Another Armenian shouted something in a strange language from the driveway guard house. Akim said, “My people want to turn on the spotlights after dark, but the neighbors complain to the police. Every time we turn them on the police come around and order us to turn them off. What kind of a country is this where a man of means cannot light up the wall around his property? It is like as if they personally hold being rich against me.”
Martin said, “Maybe what they hold against you is the way you got rich.”
“I am starting to like you,” Akim admitted. “You talk to me the way I talked to people like me when I was your age. Fact is if I did not get rich, someone else would have got rich in my place. Making money was the only thing to do when the Soviet Union disintegrated—it was a matter of not drowning in Gorbachev’s perestroika, because only the rich were able to keep their heads above water. Anyway, America brought it on, the collapse, the gangsters, the mob wars, all of it.”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re driving at,” Martin remarked.
“I am driving at history, Mr. Odum. In 1985 the Saudi oil minister, who happened to be a big wheel in the OPEC oil cartel, announced to the world that Saudi Arabia would no longer limit production to support oil prices. You want to sit there and tell me the Americans had nothing to do with this? Eight months later oil prices had plummeted seventy percent. Oil and gas exports is what kept the Soviet Union afloat for years, even for decades. The fall in oil prices started the economy downhill. Gorbachev tried to save what could be saved with his half-baked reforms, but the ship sank under his feet. When things quieted down, Russia’s borders had shrunk to where they were in 1613. It is people like me and my brother who started poking through the debris and picking up the pieces. If things are better today for the masses it is because money has been trickling down. Ha! It is an economic fact that in order for wealth to trickle down, you need to have rich people at the top to do the trickling.”
“If I’m reading you correctly, you are a born-again capitalist.”
“I am a born-again opportunist. I did not go to school like Samat—I learned what I learned in the gutter. I understand capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Do not smile, Mr. Odum. The villain was your Genry Ford. By inventing the assembly line and mass producing his cars, he lowered the price to where the assembly-line workers became consumers of their own products. And with buy-now, pay-later schemes and plastic credit cards, people were able to spend money before they accumulated it. Instant gratification killed the Protestant work ethic, which glorified work and encouraged saving. Remember you heard it here first, Mr. Odum: America is on a slippery slope. It will not be far behind the Soviet Union in crashing.”