Legends

Martin accepted the photo and tilted it toward the daylight. The bride, a pale and noticeably overweight young woman dressed in white satin with a neck-high bodice, and the groom, wearing a starched white shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple and a black suit jacket flung casually over his shoulders, stared impassively into the camera. Martin imagined Stella crying out the Russian equivalent of “Cheese” to pry a smile out of them, but it obviously hadn’t worked; the body language—the bride and groom were standing next to each other but not touching—revealed two strangers at a wake, not a husband and wife after a wedding ceremony. Samat’s face had all but disappeared behind a shaggy black beard and mustache. Only his eyes, storm-dark with anger, were visible. He was obviously irritated, but at what? The religious ceremony that had gone on too long? The prospect of marital bliss in a West Bank oubliette with a consenting Lubavitcher for cellmate?

“How tall is your sister?” Martin inquired.

“Five foot four. Why?”

“He’s slightly taller, which would make him five foot six or seven.”

“Mind if I ask you something?” Stella said.

“Ask, ask,” Martin said impatiently.

“How come you’re not taking notes?”

“There’s no reason to. I’m not taking notes because I’m not taking the case.”

Stella’s heart sank. “For God’s sake, why? My father’s ready to pay you whether you find him or not.”

“I’m not taking the case,” Martin announced, “because it’d be easier to find a needle in a field of haystacks than your sister’s missing husband.”

“You could at least try,” Stella groaned.

“I’d be wasting your father’s money and my time. Look, Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the century grew beards like your sister’s husband. It’s a trick illegals have used since Moses dispatched spies to explore the enemy order of battle at Jericho. You live with the beard long enough, people identify you with the beard. The day you want to disappear, you do what the Russian revolutionaries did—you shave it off. Your own wife couldn’t pick you out of a police lineup afterward. For argument’s sake, let’s say Samat was one of those gangster capitalists you hear so much about these days. Maybe things got too hot for your future ex-brother-in-law in Moscow the year he turned up in Kiryat Arba to marry your half sister. Chechen gangs, working out of that monster of a hotel across from the Kremlin—it’s called the Rossiya, if I remember right—were battling the Slavic Alliance to see who would control the lucrative protection rackets in the capital. There were shootouts every day as the gangs fought over territories. Witnesses to the shootouts were gunned down before they could go to the police. People going to work in the morning discovered men hanging by their necks from lampposts. Maybe Samat is Jewish, maybe he’s an Armenian Apostolic Christian. It doesn’t really matter. He buys a birth certificate certifying his mother is Jewish—they’re a dime a dozen on the black market—and applies to get into Israel. The paperwork can take six or eight months, so to speed things up your brother-in-law has a rabbi arrange a marriage with a female Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. It’s the perfect cover story, the perfect way to disappear from view until the gang wars in Moscow peter out. From his split level safe house in a West Bank settlement, he keeps in touch with his business partners; he buys and sells stocks, he arranges to export Russian raw materials in exchange for Japanese computers or American jeans. And then one bright morning, when things in Russia have calmed down, he decides he’s had enough of his Israeli dungeon. He doesn’t want his wife or the rabbis or the state of Israel asking him where he’s going, or looking him up when he gets there, so he grabs his wife’s photo album and shaves off his beard and, slipping out of Israel, disappears from the face of the planet earth.”

Stella’s lips parted as she listened to Martin’s scenario. “How do you know so much about Russia and the gang wars?”

He shrugged. “If I told you I’m not sure how I know these things, would you believe me?”

“No.”

Martin retrieved her raincoat from the banister. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.”

“I didn’t waste it,” she said quietly. “I know more now than when I came in.” She accepted the raincoat and fitted her arms into the sleeves and pulled it tightly around her body against the emotional gusts that would soon chill her to the bone. Almost as an afterthought, she produced a ballpoint pen from her pocket and, taking his palm, jotted a 718 telephone number on it. “If you change your mind …”

Martin shook his head. “Don’t hold your breath.”