Legends

“That’s Crystal Quest’s bailiwick,” Lincoln remarked.

1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS TO INSPECT THE SIBERIAN NIGHT MOTH

THE PHONE ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE HAD RUNG SO MANY times, Martin had given up counting. He decided to let it ring all evening, all night, all the next day if necessary. She had to return home sometime. A woman carrying a sleeping baby on her hip rapped a coin against the glass door of the booth and angrily held up her wrist so that Martin could see the watch on it. Muttering “Find another booth—I bought this one,” he turned his back on her. Shaking her head at how insufferable certain inhabitants of the borough had become, the woman stalked off. In Martin’s ear the phone continued to ring with such regularity that he ceased to be conscious of the sound. His thoughts wandered—he played back what he could remember of the previous phone calls. To his surprise, he was able to recreate her voice in his brain as if he were a skillful ventriloquist. He could hear her saying, When the answers are elusive you have to learn to live with the questions.

It dawned on him that the phone was no longer ringing on the other end of the line. Another human being was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.

“Stella?”

“Martin, is that you?” a voice remarkably like Stella’s demanded.

Martin was surprised when he realized how eager he was to hear that voice; to talk to the one person on earth who was not put off because he wasn’t sure who he was, who seemed ready to live with whatever version of himself he offered up. Suddenly he felt the dead bird stirring in him: He ached to see the night moth tattooed under her breast.

“It’s me, Stella. It’s Martin.”

“Jesus, Martin. Wow. I can’t believe it.”

“I’ve been ringing for hours. Where were you?”

“I met some Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket on Kingston Avenue. They were new immigrants, practically off the boat. I was entertaining them with jokes I used to tell in Moscow when I worked for subsection Marx. You want to hear a great one I just remembered?”

“Uh-huh.” Anything to keep her talking.

She giggled at the punch line before she told the joke. “Okay,” she said, collecting herself. “Three men find themselves in a cell in the Lubyanka prison. After awhile the first prisoner asks the second, ‘What are you here for?’ And the second prisoner says, ‘I was against Popov. What about you?’ And the first prisoner says, ‘I was for Popov.’ The two turn to the third prisoner and ask, “Why were you arrested?’ And he answers, ‘I’m Popov.’”

She became exasperated when Martin didn’t laugh. “When I delivered the punch line at the Moscow Writers Union, people would roll on the floor. Someone in subsection Marx tracked the joke—it spread across Moscow in three days and reached Vladivostok in a week and a half. The Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket actually applauded. And you don’t get it?”

“I get it, Stella. It’s not funny. It’s pathetic. When your joke spread across Russia, people weren’t laughing. They were crying.”

Stella thought about that. “There may be something to what you say. Hey, where are you calling from this time? Murmansk on the Barents Sea? Irkutsk on Lake Baikal?”

“Listen up, Stella. Do you remember the first time I ever phoned you?”

“How could I forget. You called to tell me you didn’t have a change of mind, you had a change of heart. You were phoning from—”

He cut her off. “I was calling from a booth that reeked of turpentine.”

He could hear her catch her breath. “On the corner of—”

He interrupted her again. “Could you find the booth if your life depended on it?”

She said, very calmly, “My life does depend on it.”

“Do me a favor and bring the autopsy report on your father that the FBI guy sent you.”

“Anything else?”

“Uh-huh. That time when I met your father, he removed a pearl-handled souvenir from the pocket of his robe and put it on a shelf where I could see it. I’d like to get my hands on that object, if it’s possible.”

“Anything else?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’d like to inspect the night moth.”

“No problem,” she said. “It goes where I go.”