“I was told it was a land mine.”
“Don’t you remember?”
“Some nights fleeting images of what happened surface in my brain: a deafening explosion, the taste of dirt in my mouth, the stickiness of my stump when I reached down to touch it, the feeling I had for months that the leg was still there and I could feel pain in it. The images seem to come from the life of another, and so I have trouble reconstructing the event.”
“Psychiatrists call that a survival mechanism, I think.”
Leaning on one cane and then the other, Rabbani returned to his high chair and hefted himself into it. “I first met Samat when I was buying Soviet surplus arms and munitions in Moscow in the early nineties so that Massoud and my brother could defend the Panjshir. The Russian army units pulling out of their bases in the former German Democratic Republic after the Berlin Wall came down were selling off everything in their arsenals—rifles, machine guns, mortars, land mines, radios, jeeps, tanks, ammunition. Samat, representing the business interests of someone very powerful, was the middleman. It was a period of my life when I felt no guilt about buying and using these arms. I did to the Taliban what they eventually did to me. That was before I myself walked on a land mine. Take it from someone who has been there, Mr. Odum, it’s an exhilarating experience, stepping on a mine. One instant you are attached to the ground, the next you are defying gravity, flailing away in the air. When you fall back to earth you have one limb less and nothing—not your body, not your mind—is ever the same. It was Samat who arranged for me to be flown to a Moscow hospital. It was Samat who came around with my manufactured-in-America artificial leg. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I became another person. Which is why you find me presiding over a warehouse filled with prostheses that we sell at cost.”
“And where does the name ‘Soft Shoulder’ come from?”
“Samat and I were traveling in the U.S. once,” Rabbani explained. “We were driving a large American automobile from Santa Fe, in New Mexico, to New York, when we stumbled across the idea of going into the business of exporting artificial limbs at prices that would make them more easily affordable to the victims of war. We had pulled up at the side of the road to urinate when we shook hands on the project. Next to the car was a sign that read ‘Soft Shoulder.’ Neither of us knew what it meant, but we decided it would make a fitting name for our company.”
The intercom buzzed. Rabbani depressed a lever with a deft jab of a cane and barked irritably, “And what is it now, my girl?”
Mrs. Rainfield’s voice came over the speaker. “Truck’s here for the Bosnia shipment, Mr. Rabbani. I sent them round back to the loading dock. They gave me a certified bank check for the correct amount.”
“Call the bank to confirm it issued the check. Meanwhile get Rachid to supervise the loading.” Rabbani tripped the lever closed with his cane, cutting the connection. “Can’t be too vigilant,” he moaned. “Lot of shady dealers make a lot of money peddling prostheses—they are not happy when someone else sells them at cost.” He pried the stub of the cigarette out of his mouth and lobbed it across the room into a metal waste basket. “When were you in Israel, Mr. Odum?”
“Went there roughly ten days back.”
“You told Mrs. Rainfield to tell me you knew Samat from Israel. Why did you lie?”
Martin understood that a lot depended on how he answered the question. “In order to get past the front door,” he said. He angled his head. “What makes you think I was lying?”
Rabbani pulled an enormous handkerchief from a pocket and wiped the perspiration under his shirt collar at the back of his neck. “Samat left Israel before you got there, my son.”
“How do you know that?”
The old man shrugged his bony shoulders. “I will not ask you how you know what you know. Do me the courtesy of not asking me how I know what I know. Samat fled from Israel. If you came knocking on my door today, it is because you somehow found a record of his phone conversations and traced the calls he made to this address in London, despite the fact that these phone records were supposed to have been destroyed. I will not ask you how you did that—the phone company is not permitted to reveal addresses corresponding to unlisted numbers.”
“Why did you let me in if you knew I was lying about Samat?”
“I calculated if you were clever enough to find me, you might be clever enough to lead me to Samat.”
“Join the queue, Mr. Rabbani. It seems as if everyone I meet wants to find Samat.”
“They want to find Samat in order to kill him. I want to find him in order to save his life.”
“Do you know why he fled Israel?”
“Certainly I know. He fled from Israel for the same reason he fled to Israel. Chechen hit men were after him. Have been since the Great Mob Wars in Moscow. Samat works for the Oligarkh—you’re smart, I’ll give you that, but not so smart that you’ve heard of him.”
Martin couldn’t resist. “Samat’s uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov.”
The old man cackled until the laugh turned into a grating cough. Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. He dabbed at it with the handkerchief as he gasped for breath. “You are a smart one. Do you know what happened during the Great Mob War?”
“The Slavic Alliance battled the Chechen gangs. Over territory. Over who controlled what.”
“At the height of the war the Chechens had about five hundred fighters working out of the Rossiya Hotel not far from the Kremlin. The leader of the Chechens was known by his nom de guerre, which was the Ottoman. The Oligarkh arranged to have him and his lady friend at the time kidnapped. Samat was sent to negotiate with the Chechens—if they wanted their leader back they would have to abandon Moscow and settle for some of the smaller cities that the Oligarkh was willing to cede to them. The Chechens said they needed to discuss the matter with the others. Samat decided they were playing for time—even if they agreed, there was no guarantee they would give up Moscow. He persuaded the Oligarkh that the Chechens needed to be taught a lesson. Next morning people going to work found the body of the Ottoman and his lady friend hanging upside down from a lamppost near the Kremlin wall—newspapers compared it to the death of Mussolini and his mistress in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War.”
“And you call Samat a philanthropist?”
“We all of us have many sides, my son. That was one side of Samat. The other was selling prostheses at cost to provide limbs to land-mine victims. I was one person before I stepped on the land mine and another after. What about you, Mr. Odum? Are you one dimensional or do you have multiple personalities like the rest of us?”
Martin brought a hand up to his forehead to contain the migraine throbbing like the trains pulling into and out of the station. Across the room the old man carefully pulled another cigarette from a desk drawer and lit it with a wooden match, which he ignited with a flick of his fingernail. Once again the smog of a rain cloud rose over his head. “Who is paying you to find Samat, Mr. Odum?”
Martin explained about the wife Samat had abandoned in Israel; how she needed to find her husband so he could grant her a religious divorce in front of a rabbinical court. Puffing away on his cigarette, Rabbani thought about this. “Not like Samat to abandon a wife like that,” he decided. “If he ran for it, it means the Chechens tracked him to that Jew colony next to Hebron. Chechens have long knives and long memories—I’ve been told some of them carry photographs cut from the newspapers of the Ottoman and his lady hanging upside down from a Moscow lamppost. The Chechens must have been knocking on Samat’s door, figuratively speaking, for him to cut and run.” Rabbani hauled open another drawer and retrieved a metal box, which he opened with a key attached to the fob of the gold watch in his vest pocket. He took out a wad of English bank notes and dropped them on the edge of the desk nearest Martin. “I would like to find Samat before the Chechens catch up with him. I would like to help him. He does not need money—he has access to all the money he could ever want. But he does need friends. I could arrange for him to disappear into a new identity; into a new life even. So will you work for me, Mr. Odum? Will you find Samat and tell him that Taletbek Rabbani stands ready to come to the assistance of his friend?”