“If Samat is being hunted by the Chechens, helping him could come back to haunt you.”
Rabbani reached for one of the canes and tapped it against his false limb. “I owe Samat my leg. And my leg has become my life. A Panjshiri never turns his back on such a debt, my son.”
Martin pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the desk and fanned the stack of banknotes as if it were a deck of cards. Then he collected them and shoved them into a pocket. “I hope you are going to tell me where to start to look.”
The old man picked up the pencil, scratched something on the back of an envelope and handed it to Martin. “Samat came here after he left Israel—he wanted to touch base with the projects to which he was especially attached. He stayed two days, then took a plane to Prague. There is an affiliate in Prague—another one of Samat’s pet projects—that’s doing secret work for him on the side. I met one of the directors, a Czech woman, when she came here to see Samat. She gave me her card in case I ever visited Prague.”
“What kind of secret work?”
“Not sure. I overheard the woman talking with Samat—the project had something to do with trading the bones of a Lithuanian saint for sacred Jewish Torah scrolls. Don’t ask what the bones of a saint have to do with Torah scrolls. I don’t know. Samat was very compartmented. The Samat I knew exported prostheses at cost. There were other Samats that I only caught glimpses of—one of them was concocting a scheme at the address I gave you in Prague.”
Martin glanced at the paper, then held out a hand. Rabbani’s bony fingers, soft with paraffin-colored skin, gripped his as if he didn’t want him to leave. Words barely recognizable as human speech bubbled up from the old man’s larynx. “I see things from the perspective of someone who is knocking at death’s door. Apocalypse is just around the corner, my son. You are looking at me as if I belong in an asylum, Mr. Odum. I am in an asylum. So come to think of it are you. Western civilization, or what is left of it, is one big asylum. The happy few who understand this are more often than not diagnosed as crazy and hidden away in lunatic bins.” Rabbani struggled for breath. “Find Samat before they do,” he gasped. “He is one of the happy few.”
“I’ll do my best,” Martin promised.
Making his way back through the aisles toward the front of the warehouse, Martin passed three lean men wrestling cartons onto a dolly. Rabbani’s bodyguard, Rachid, stood apart, watching them with his unblinking eyes. The three men, all clean shaven, were dressed alike in orange jumpsuits with the insignia of a shipping company sewn over the zipper of the breast pocket. As Martin walked past, they raised their eyes to scrutinize him; none of them smiled. There was something about the men that troubled Martin—but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Mrs. Rainfield waved from her cubical as he headed down the cement corridor toward the front door. As he reached it a discreet crackle of electric current sizzled through the lock and the door clicked open. Out in the street, Martin waved cheerfully at the security camera over his head. He was still trying to figure out what it was about the three shippers that had caught his eye as he started up the street in the direction of Golders Green and the rooming house.
The three men in orange jumpsuits piled the cartons so high on the dolly that the topmost one began to teeter. Rachid jumped forward to keep it from falling to the ground. “Watch what you are doing—” he started to say. He turned back to find himself staring into the bore of a silencer screwed into the barrel of an Italian Beretta. It was aimed directly at his forehead.
Rachid nodded imperceptibly, a Muslim authorizing the assassin to end his life. The man in the orange jumpsuit nodded back, acknowledging that Rachid was the master of his destiny, and squeezed the trigger. There was a muted hiss from the handgun, which recoiled slightly as a neat puncture wound materialized in Rachid’s forehead. The second man caught him under the armpits and lowered the body to the cement floor. The third man crossed the warehouse to Mrs. Rainfield’s office and rapped his knuckles on the glass door. She motioned for him to come in. “What can I do you, dear?” she asked.
He produced a silenced pistol from the zippered pocket of his jumpsuit and shot her through the heart. “Die,” he replied as she slumped onto the desk, her lifeless eyes frozen open in bewilderment.
Back in the warehouse, the two other men knocked on the door of Taletbek Rabbani’s office and entered. One of them held out the manifest. “Mr. Rabbani, there are two cartons of size six foot-prostheses missing,” one of them said as they approached his desk.
“That is absolutely impossible,” Taletbek Rabbani said, snatching up his canes and pushing himself to his feet. “Did you ask Rachid—” He became aware of the handgun fitted with a silencer inches from his skull. “Who are you?” he whispered harshly. “Who sent you?”
“We are who we are,” the man with the gun responded. He wrenched the canes out of Taletbek’s hands and, grabbing him by the wrists, dragged him across the warehouse, a Gucci loafer trailing at the end of the plastic prosthesis, to a stanchion near the body of Rachid. The man who had shot Mrs. Rainfield brought over a spool of thick orange packing cord and tied the old man’s wrists. Then he lobbed the spool over an overhead pipe and pulled on the cord until Taletbek’s arms, stretched directly above his head, were straining in their shoulder sockets and the toe of his good foot was scraping the cement. The man who appeared to be the leader of the team approached the old man.
“Where is Samat?”
Taletbek shook his head. “How is it possible to tell you something I myself do not know?”
“You will forfeit your life if you refuse to help us find him.”
“When you arrive in hell, I will be waiting for you, my son.”
“Are you a Muslim?” the leader inquired.
Taletbek managed to nod.
“Do you believe in the Creator, the Almighty? Do you believe in Allah?”
Taletbek indicated he did.
“Have you made pilgrimage to Mecca?”
Rabbani, his face contorted with pain, nodded again.
“Say your prayers, then. You are about to meet the one true God.”
The old man shut his eyes and murmured: “Ash’hadu an la illahu ila Allah wa’ash’hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allah.”
From the inside of his boot, the leader of the team of killers drew a razor sharp dagger with a groove along its thin blade and a yellowing camel bone handle. He stepped to one side of the old man and probed the soft wrinkles of skin on his thin neck looking for a vein.
“For the last time, where is Samat?”
“Samat who?”
The leader found the vein and slowly imbedded the blade into Taletbek’s neck until only the hilt remained visible. Blood spurted, staining the killer’s orange jumpsuit before he could leap out of the way. The old man breathed in liquidy gasps, each shallower than the previous one, until his head plunged forward and his weight sagged under the cord, pulling his arms out of the shoulder sockets.
Martin dialed Stella’s number in Crown Heights from the booth and listened to the phone ringing on the other end. It dawned on him that he was looking forward to hearing her voice—there was no denying that she had gotten under his skin. “That really you, Martin?” she exclaimed before he could finish a sentence. “Goddamn, I’m glad to hear from you. Missed you, believe it or not.”