Martin leaned against the door jamb. “Does Mrs. Rainfield act any differently than Mrs. Froth?”
“I s’pose she does, now that you mention it. My Mr. Froth fancies me in miniskirts and tight sweaters, he does. Mr. Rainfield wouldn’t ’ave let me outa me house dressed like this. It’s a lot like Samat’s cape, isn’t it, dear? What you wear is who you want to be.” Fluttering unnaturally long lashes, Mrs. Rainfield pointed out the door at the bitter end of the passageway with her eyes. “Through there, then cross the warehouse on a diagonal and you’ll fall on Mr. Rabbani’s bailiwick. His factotum, an Egyptian named Rachid—trust me, you won’t miss him—minds the door.”
“Is Rachid his real name or is it a matter of Mr. Rabbani not wanting to redo the paperwork?”
Mrs. Rainfield giggled appreciatively.
Martin said, “Thank you” and started down the corridors created by stacks of cartons, all of them stencilled with the word “Prosthesis” and “Arm” or “Leg” and a measurement in inches and centimeters, along with a notation in smaller print that the articles had been manufactured in the United States of America. Above Martin’s head, diffused sunlight streamed through skylights stained with soot and bird droppings. A heavy-set man with unshaven jowls and untidy hair, clearly the body guard, loomed beyond the last cartons. A handwritten nametag pinned to the wide lapel of his double-breasted suit jacket identified him as Rachid.
“You carrying?” he inquired, sizing Martin up with eyes that conveyed indifference to the visitor’s fate in the unlikely event he resisted inspection.
Martin played a role he wasn’t accustomed to: innocent. “Carrying what?”
Rachid snapped, “Something the municipal police might mistake for a handgun.”
Grinning, Martin spread his legs apart and raised his arms. The bodyguard frisked him very professionally, passing his hand so high up the crotch that he grazed his penis with his knuckles, causing Martin to shudder.
“You ticklish, then?” the bodyguard remarked with a smirk. He inclined his head in the direction of a door with a neatly lettered plastic placard on it that said “Taletbek Rabbani—Export.” Martin knocked. After a moment he knocked again and heard the scratchy voice of an old man call out weakly, “So what are you waiting on, my son, a hand delivered invite?”
Looking like a parenthesis, Taletbek Rabbani sat on a high stool hunched over a high desk, a thick cigarette dangling from his bone-dry lips, a smog of smoke hovering over his bald head like a rain cloud. An old man who must have been nudging ninety, he was not much thicker that the pencil clasped in his arthritic fingers. A tuft of coarse white hair protruded from under his lower lip and served as a receptacle for the ash that dropped off the burning end of the cigarette. A swell of warm air enveloped Martin as he stepped into the room; the old man kept his office heated to near sauna temperatures. Settling onto a tattered settee with the tag “Imported from Sri Lanka” still attached to one spindly wooden leg, Martin could hear the water gurgling through the radiators. “Taletbek Rabbani sounds like a Tajik name,” he remarked. “If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say you were a Tajik from the steppes of the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. I seem to remember there was a tribal chief named Rabbani who presided over a cluster of mountain villages near the frontier with Uzbekistan.”
Rabbani waved his skeletal fingers to dispel the cigarette smoke and get a better look at his visitor. “You have been to Afghanistan?” he demanded.
“In a previous incarnation I hung out for the better part of a year near the Khyber Pass.”
Rabbani was still trying to get a handle on Martin’s curriculum vitae. “What were you doing, my son, buying or selling?”
“Buying. Stories. I was debriefing fighters going into and out of Afghanistan and writing them up for a wire service.”
An ephemeral smile crossed Rabbani’s age-ravaged eyes. “Wire service, my foot. Only people who hung out at the Khyber Pass were American intelligence agents. Which means you were on the same side as my older brother, the tribal chieftain Rabbani.”
Martin had guessed as much once he’d placed Rabbani’s name; he hoped that this would get him off on the right track with the old codger who, he now noticed, kept his left hand out of sight below the desk. His fingers were certainly wrapped around the butt end of a pistol.
“What happened to your brother after the Russians were kicked out?”
“Along with everyone else in the valley, he got caught up in the civil war—he fought alongside Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Taliban when they abandoned their medrassahs in Pakistan and started to infiltrate into Afghanistan. One day the Taliban invited my brother to meet under a white flag in the outskirts of Kabul.” The same smile appeared in Rabbani’s eyes, only this time it was tainted with bitterness. “I advised him against going, but he was strong headed and fearless and shrugged off my counsel. And so he went. And so the Taliban cut his throat, along with those of his three bodyguards.”
“I vaguely remember the incident.”
Rabbani’s left hand came into view, which told Martin that he had passed muster.
“To have been at the Khyber, to remember Rabbani,” the old man said, “you must have worked for the CIA.” When Martin neither confirmed nor denied it, Rabbani nodded slowly. “I understand there are things that are never spoken aloud. You must forgive an old man for his lack of discretion.”
Martin could hear trains pulling into or out of the station next to the warehouse with the rhythmic throb that was almost as satisfying as travel itself. “If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Rabbani, how did you wind up in London?”
“I was dispatched by my brother to England to purchase medical supplies for our wounded fighters. When my brother was murdered, a cousin on my mother’s side profited from my absence to usurp the leadership of the tribe. My cousin and I are sworn enemies—tribal custom prevents me from exposing to you the reason for this feud while there is no representative of my cousin present to defend the other side of the matter. Suffice it to say that it became healthier for me to stay on in London.”
“And you went into the business of selling prostheses with Samat?”
“I don’t know how well you know Samat,” Rabbani said, “but he is a philanthropist at heart. He provided the start-up money to lease this warehouse and open the business.”
“The Samat I know does not have a reputation as a philanthropist,” Martin said flatly. “He wheels and deals in many of the weapons that lead to the loss of limbs. If he is in the business of selling false limbs to war-torn countries, there must be a healthy profit in it.”
“You misread Samat, my son,” Rabbani insisted. “And you misread me. Samat is too young to be interested only in profit, and I am too old. The cartons filled with false limbs that you saw on the way to my office are sold at cost.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You clearly do not believe me.” Rabbani slipped awkwardly off of the high stool and, retrieving two wooden canes that had been out of sight behind the desk, made his way across the room. When he stood before the settee, he hiked the trouser on his left leg, revealing a skin-colored plastic prosthesis with a Gucci loafer fitted onto the end of it.
Martin asked quietly, “How did you lose your leg?”