Legends

“I can say that I was the one who first told Samat about the Jewish Torah scrolls in the Lithuanian church.” Her hand drifted up to her neck to finger the Star of David. “My older sister was deported during the war to a concentration camp in Lithuania. She managed to escape into the steppe and joined the communist partisans harassing the German rear. It was my sister—her partisan name was Rosa, after the German communist Rosa Luxemburg; her real name was Melka—who attempted to warn the Jews in the shtetls not yet overrun by the Germans and the einsatzsgruppen murderers who followed behind them. Few believed her—they simply did not imagine that the descendants of Goethe and Beethoven and Brahms were capable of the mass murder of an entire people. But in several of the shtetls the rabbis hedged their bets—they collected the sacred Torah scrolls and priceless commentaries, some of them many hundreds of years old, and gave them to a Lithuanian Orthodox bishop to hide in a remote church. After the war my sister passed on to me the name of this church—Spaso-Preobrazhenski Sabor, which means Church of the Transfiguration, in the town of Zuzovka, on the Neman River just inside Lithuania near the frontier with Belarus. When I told the story to Samat, he dropped what he was doing—Samat, who was not as far as I know Jewish, went directly to the church to recover the Torah scrolls and bring them to Israel. The Metropolitan of the diocese refused to give them back; refused even to sell them back when Samat offered him a large sum of money. The Metropolitan was willing, however, to trade the Torah scrolls for the relics of Saint Gedymin, who established the Lithuanian capital in Vilnius in thirteen hundred something. Saint Gedymin’s bones had been stolen from the church by German troops during the war. After years of inquiry, Samat was finally able to trace the bones of the saint to Argentina. They had been smuggled there by Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of the war and deposited in a small Orthodox church near the city of Córdoba. When the church refused to part with the bones of Saint Gedymin, Samat went to see a person he knew in the Argentine government; in the Defense Ministry, actually. Samat told me he had persuaded the Defense Ministry to repatriate the saintly relics to Lithuania—”

“In return for what?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know. Samat mentioned that he’d been to see the people at the Argentine Defense Ministry. But he never told me what they wanted in exchange for the relics of Saint Gedymin.”

“When did he tell you about the Defense Ministry?”

“The last time he passed through Prague.”

“Yes, and when was that?”

“After he left Israel he went to London to see Taletbek Rabbani. From London he flew here to see me on his way to—”

Martin became aware that Zuzana Slánská’s rheumy eyes had focused on something over his shoulder. He noticed her fingers slipping the Star of David out of sight under the collar of her blouse as he twisted in his seat to see what she was looking at. Radek, holding his deerstalker over his solar plexus, his other hand buried in the pocket of the Tyrolean jacket, stood at the doors of the salon du thé surveying the clients. He spotted Zuzana Slánská and Martin across the room and pointed them out with one of the brims of his deerstalker as he started threading his way through the tables toward them. A dozen men in civilian suits fanned out behind him.

A gasp of pure dread escaped from Zuzana Slánská’s throat as she rose to her feet. She uttered the words, “Old age is not for the weak of heart,” then, her eyes fixed on Radek, her lips barely moving, she said: “There is an island in the Aral Sea twenty kilometers off the mainland called Vozrozhdeniye. During the Soviet era it was used as a bioweapons testing range. On the island is the town of Kantubek. Samat’s contact in Kantubek is a Georgian named Hamlet Achba. Can you remember all that?”

“Vozrozhdeniye. Kantubek. Hamlet Achba.”

“Warn Samat …” Radek was almost upon them. “Oh, it’s for sure I will not survive the stench of another prison,” she murmured to herself.

Around them the waiters and the clients had frozen in place, mesmerized by the progress of Radek and his companions toward the two customers at the small table in the back of the room. Radek, a faint smile of satisfaction disfiguring his lips, reached the table. “I have a gub in my pocket,” he informed Martin. “It is a German Walther P1. You are arrested, Mister. You, also, Misses, are arrested.”