“An associate of Samat’s named Taletbek Rabbani.” He produced the back of the envelope with Rabbani’s barely legible scrawl on it and showed it to the woman.
A shadow passed over her face. “News of Mr. Rabbani’s death reached us earlier this week. When and where did you meet him?”
“The same place you met him—at his warehouse behind the train station in the Golders Green section of London. I was probably the last person to see him alive—not counting the Chechens who murdered him.”
“The small item in the British newspaper made no mention of Chechens.”
“It may be that Scotland Yard doesn’t know this detail. It may be they know it but do not want to tip their hand.”
Smiling nervously, the woman led Martin into a large oval room lit by several naked neon fixtures suspended from the ceiling. The three windows in the office were covered with planking, reminding Martin of the time Dante Pippen had followed Djamillah into the mercantile office above the bar in Beirut—the windows there had been boarded over, too. He looked around, taking in the room. Large cartons with “This Side Up” stenciled on them were stacked against one wall. A young woman in a loose fitting sweater and faded blue jeans sat at a desk, typing with two fingers on a vintage table-model Underwood. At the edge of the desk, a scroll of facsimile paper spilled from a fax machine into a carton on the floor. A loose-leaf book lay open on a low glass table filled with coffee stains and overflowing ashtrays. The woman motioned Martin to a seat on the automobile banquette against the wall and settled onto a low three-legged stool facing him, her crossed ankles visible through the thick glass of the table. “I assume Mr. Rabbani explained how we operate here. In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we do business out of this defunct station to reduce the overhead and we only sell our generic medicines in bulk. Is there anything in particular you are looking for, Mr. Odum? Our best sellers are the Tylenol generic, acetaminophen, the Valium generic, diazepam, the Sudafed generic, pseudoephedrine, the Kenacort generic, triamcinolone. Please feel free to thumb through the loose-leaf catalogue. The labels of our generic medicines are pasted onto the pages. I am not aware of any particular epidemic threatening the Ivory Coast aside from the HIV virus—we unfortunately do not yet have access to generic drugs for AIDS, but hope governments will put pressure on the drug conglomerates …” She gazed at her visitor, a sudden question visible in her eyes. “You didn’t mention your medical credentials, Mr. Odum. Are you a trained doctor or a public health specialist?”
Another commuter train roared by behind the station. When it had passed, Martin said, “Neither.”
Zuzana Slánská’s fingers came up to touch the small Star of David attached to the chain around her neck. “I am not sure I comprehend you.”
Martin leaned forward. “I have a confession to make. I am not here to buy generic medicines.” He looked directly into her rheumy eyes. “I have come to find out more about Samat’s project concerning the exchange of the bones of the Lithuanian saint for the Jewish Torah scrolls.”
“Oh!” The woman glanced at the secretary typing up order forms across the room. “It’s a long story,” she said softly, “and I shall badly need a brandy and several cigarettes to get me through it.”
Zuzana Slánská leaned toward Martin so that he could light her cigarette with a match from the book advertising Prague crystal. “I have never smoked a Beedie before,” she noted, sinking back, savoring the taste of the Indian cigarette. She pulled it from her mouth and carefully examined it. “Is there marijuana mixed with the tobacco?” she asked.
Martin shook his head. “You’re smelling the eucalyptus leaves.”
She took another drag on the Beedie. “I am wary of the experts who argue so passionately that smoking is dangerous for your health,” she remarked, the words emerging from her mouth along with the smoke. As she turned away to glance at the two fat men sucking on thick cigars at a nearby table, it struck Martin that she had the profile of a woman who must have been a stunner in her youth. “There are a great many things dangerous for your health,” she added, turning back. “Don’t you agree?”
Concentrating on his own cigarette, Martin said, “For instance?”
“For instance, living under high tension wires. For instance, eating fast food with artificial flavoring. For instance, being right when your government is wrong.” She favored the old waiter with a worn smile as he carefully set out two snifters half-filled with three-star Jerez brandy, along with a shallow Dresden bowl brimming with peanuts. “I am speaking from bitter experience,” she added, “but you surely will have grasped that from the tone of my voice.”
She had led him on foot across the river to the salon du thé on the top floor of a gaudy hotel that had only recently opened for business. From the window next to the table at the back of the enormous room, Martin could see what he’d spotted from the plane: the hills rimming Prague and the communist-era apartment buildings spilling over them. “My husband,” the woman was saying, caught up in her own story, “was a medical doctor practicing in Vinohrady, which is a district of Prague behind the museum. I worked as his nurse. The two of us joined a literary circle that met once a week to discuss books. Oh, I can tell you, it was an exhilarating time for us. My husband was fearless—he used to all the time joke that old age was not for the weak of heart.” She gulped down some of the brandy and puffed furiously on her Beedie, as if time were running out; as if she had to relate her life’s story before her life ended. “Tell me if all this bores you to tears, Mr. Odum.”
“The opposite is true,” Martin assured her. “It mesmerizes me to tears.”
Zuzana Slánská hiked one slim shoulder inside her tailored Parisian jacket. “We were ardent Marxists, my husband and I. We were convinced it was the great Russian bear that had suffocated communism and not the other way around. Our Czech hero, Alexander Dubcek, was still a loyal party-line apparatchik when we began signing petitions demanding reforms. The Soviet-appointed proconsuls who reigned over us could not distinguish between dissidents who were anticommunist and those, like us, who were procommunist but argued that it had gone wrong; that it needed to be set right in order for Marxism to survive. Or if they did distinguish between us, they calculated that our form of dissidence was the more threatening of the two. And so we suffered the same fate as the others.”
Martin could see the muscles on her face contorting with heartache remembered so vividly that she seemed to be experiencing it now. “You must know the story,” she rushed on, barely bothering to breathe. “The one about the NKVD commissar admitting to Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin that a particular prisoner had refused to confess. Stalin considered the problem, then asked the commissar how much the state weighed, the state with all its buildings and factories and machines, the army with all its tanks and trucks, the navy with all its ships, the air force with all its planes. And then Stalin said, dear God, he said, Do you really think this prisoner can withstand the weight of the state?”
“Did you feel the weight of the state? Were you and your husband jailed?”
Zuzana Slánská had become so agitated that she began swallowing smoke and brandy in the same gulp. “Certainly we felt the weight of the state. Certainly we were jailed, some months at the same time and once even in the same prison, some months at different times so that we passed each other like ships in the night. I discovered that when you left prison you took the stench of it with you in your nostrils; it took months, years to get rid of it. Oh, once my husband returned from prison so beat up that I didn’t recognize him through the spy hole in the door and called the police to save me from a lunatic, and they came and looked at his identity card and told me it was safe to let him in, the lunatic in question was my husband. Does it happen in America, Mr. Odum, that the police must assure you it is safe to let your husband pass the door of your apartment? And then one day my husband was arrested for treating the broken ankle of a youth who turned out to be an anticommunist dissident hiding from the police. The journalists from America covering the trial pointed out in their stories that the same thing had happened to the American doctor who treated the broken ankle of A. Lincoln’s assassin.”