Legends

My uncle Tzvetan wants to see you as soon as possible. He has urgent messages he must send to Langley. He wants assurances he will be exfiltrated if things turn bad. He wants to be sure the people you work for lay in the plumbing for the exfiltration before it is needed.

How do I meet him?

He lives in a village not far from Moscow. It’s called Prigorodnaia. I invite you to his dacha for the weekend. We will tell everyone we were roommates at the Forestry Institute. We studied computer science together, in case anyone should ask.

I don’t know anything about computers.

Except for me, neither does anyone else at Prigorodnaia.

Martin caught sight of the low wooden houses on the edge of the village ahead, each with its small fenced vegetable garden, several with a cow or a pig tethered to a tree. A burly peasant splitting logs on a stump looked up and appeared to freeze. The large axe slipped from his fingers as he gaped at the visitor. He backed away from Martin, as he would from a ghost, then turned and scampered along the path that ended at the small church with paint peeling from its onion domes. Nearing the church, Martin noticed a patch of terrain behind the cemetery that had been leveled and cemented over—a great circle had been whitewashed onto the surface blackened by engine exhaust. An Orthodox priest wearing a washed-out black robe so short it left his bare matchstick-thin ankles and Nike running shoes exposed stood before the doors of the church. He held a minuscule wooden cross high over his head as men and women, alerted by the log splitter, drifted through the village lanes toward the church.

“Is it really you, Jozef?” the priest demanded.

As Martin drew nearer many of the women, whispering to each other, crossed themselves feverishly.

Martin approached the priest. “Has Samat come back to Prigorodnaia?” he asked.

“Come and departed in his helicopter. Donated this cross, fabricated from the wood of the True Cross of Zuzovka, to our church here in Prigorodnaia, where his sainted mother prays daily for his soul. For yours, too.”

“Is he in danger?”

“No more, no less than we were after it was discovered that the planks over the crater in the spur had been removed and the man buried alive had gone missing.”

Martin understood that he was supposed to know what the priest was talking about. “Who protected Samat?” he asked.

“His uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one we call the Oligarkh, protected Samat.”

“And who protected his uncle?”

The priest shook his head. “Organizations too powerful to have their names spoken aloud.”

“And who protected you when you removed the planks over the crater and freed the man buried alive?”

“Almighty God protected us,” said the priest, and he crossed himself in the Orthodox style with his free hand.

Martin looked up at the onion domes, then back at the priest. “I want to talk to Samat’s mother,” he announced, thinking she might be among the women watching from the path.

“She lives alone in the Oligarkh’s dacha,” the priest said.

“Kristyna is a raving lunatic,” said the peasant who had been splitting logs. Crossing themselves again, the other peasants nodded in agreement.

“And where is the Oligarkh, then?” Martin thought to ask.

“Why, none of us can say where the Oligarkh went to when he quit Prigorodnaia.”

“And when did the Oligarkh leave Prigorodnaia?”

“No one knows for sure. One day he was here, struggling down the path near the river on aluminum crutches, his bodyguards following behind, his Borzois dancing ahead, the next the dacha was stripped of its furnishings and echoed with emptiness, and only a single candle burned in a downstairs window during the long winter night.”

Martin started toward the sprawling dacha with the wooden crow’s-nest rising above the white birches that surrounded the house. The peasants blocking the path gave way to let him through; several reached out to touch an arm and a toothless old woman cackled, “Back from the dead and the buried, then.” Gaunt chickens and a rooster with resplendent plumes scrambled out from under Martin’s feet, stirring up fine dust from the path. Drawn by curiosity, the villagers and the priest, still holding aloft the sliver of a cross, trailed after him, careful to keep a respectful distance.