Legends

“In the early nineteen-eighties,” Kastner explained, “Ugor-Zhilov was a small-time hoodlum in a small pond—he ran a used-car dealership in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He had a KGB record: He’d been arrested in the early seventies for bribery and black market activities and sent to a gulag in the Kolyma Mountains for eight years. Read Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich and you will get a glimpse of what each day of Ugor-Zhilov’s eight years was like. By the time he made his way back to Armenia and scraped together enough money to open the used-car business, he was bitterly anti-Soviet; bitterly anti-Russian, also. He would have faded from our radar screen if he hadn’t set his sights on bigger fish in bigger ponds. He came to Moscow and in a matter of months cornered the used-car market there. One by one he bought out his competitors. Those who would not sell wound up dead or maimed. The punishment handed out by the Oligarkh was what you Americans call cruel and unusual—he believed that it was good for business if his enemies had reason to dread him. When I spoke to Samat in Geneva, he passed on a story that Ugor-Zhilov had actually buried someone alive and had a road paved over him—and this while several dozen workers looked on. The story of the execution may or may not be true—either way it served its purpose. Few Russians were reckless enough to challenge the Oligarkh.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,” Martin observed.

“I was the conducting officer in charge of the investigation into the Oligarkh’s affairs.”

Martin saw where the story was going. “I’ll take a wild guess—he paid off the Sixth Directorate.”

Kastner didn’t respond for a moment. “You have to put yourself in our shoes,” he said finally. “We were honest cops and we went after him in a straightforward manner. But he bought the minister in the Kremlin who ran the KGB, then he bought my colleague who was the head of the Sixth Chief Directorate, and then he turned to me and put a thick packet of money on the table, this at a time when we sometimes went several months without drawing a salary because of the economic chaos. What was I to do? If I accepted I would be on his payroll. If I refused I would seriously compromise my life expectancy.”

“So you defected to America.”

Kastner plucked his cigarette from the saucer and inhaled deeply, then sniffed at the smoke in the air. “It was the only solution,” he said.

“Knowing what you knew about uncle Ugor-Zhilov, why did you agree to let your daughter marry his nephew Samat?”

Stella came to her father’s defense. “Kastner agreed because he didn’t have a choice.”

Kastner said, very quietly, “You do not understand how things worked after communism collapsed. One morning there arrived in my mailbox downstairs here on President Street a letter typed on expensive bonded paper. It was not signed but I immediately understood where it came from. The writer said that his nephew was obliged to leave Russia, and quickly. It said that the best place for him to go would be Israel. It was a time when Jews were queuing up by the tens of thousands for visas at the Israeli embassy in Moscow; the Israeli Mossad, fearful that what was left of the KGB apparatus would try to infiltrate agents into Israel, was screening the Jewish applicants very carefully. And carefully meant slowly. Ugor-Zhilov obviously knew that my daughter Elena had joined the Lubavitch sect soon after we settled in Crown Heights. He knew that the Lubavitchers had a lot of influence when it came to getting Jews into Israel—they could arrange for the Israeli immigration authorities to speed things up if there was a Lubavitch marriage involved, especially if the newlyweds planned to live in one of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which the Israeli government at the time was eager to populate.”

Martin felt claustrophobic in the airless closet; he had a visceral revulsion for closed spaces without windows. “Something doesn’t make sense here,” he said, eyeing the door, mastering an urge to throw it open. “How could Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov send a letter to you if you were in the FBI’s witness protection—”

Martin’s mouth sagged open; the answer to his question came to him before Kastner supplied it.

“It was because he was able to send a letter to me,” Kastner said, “despite my being in the FBI program, that it was out of the realm of possibility to refuse him. Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov is one of the richest men in all of Russia; one of the fifty richest men in the world, according to that article in Time. He has a long arm, long enough to reach someone who has been given a new identity and lives on President Street in Crown Heights.” He glanced at Stella and the two exchanged grim smiles. “Long enough,” Kastner continued, “to reach his two beautiful girls, also. When the Oligarkh asks for a favor, it is not healthy to refuse if you are confined to a wheel chair and have nowhere else to defect to.”