Legends

Martin remembered the words from the Bob Dylan song he’d heard in the street and he repeated them aloud: “Not much is really sacred.”

“Not true,” Kastner burst out. “Many things are still sacred. Protecting my daughters is at the top of the list.”

“Kastner could not be expected to anticipate how Samat would mistreat Elena,” Stella put in. “It was not his fault—”

Kastner cut her off. “Whose fault was it if not mine?” he said despondently.

“Aren’t you running a risk by hiring me to find this Samat?”

“I only want him to give my Elena the religious divorce so she can marry again. What he does with his life after that is his affair. Surely this is not an unreasonable request.” Kastner worked the joystick, backing the wheelchair into the wall with a light thud. He shrugged his heavy shoulders as if he were trying to rid himself of a weight. “In terms of money, how do we organize this?”

“I pay my way with credit cards. When the credit card people ask me for money, I will ask you to pay my expenses. If I find Samat and your daughter gets her get, we’ll figure out what that’s worth to you. If I don’t find him, you’ll be out of pocket my expenses. Nothing more.”

“In your pool parlor you spoke of the problem of searching for a needle in a field of haystacks,” Stella said. “Where on earth do you begin looking for it?”

“Everyone is somewhere,” Martin informed her. “We’ll start in Israel.”

Stella, startled, said, “We?”

Martin nodded. “First off, there’s your sister—she’ll trust me more if you’re with me when I meet her. Then there’s Samat. Someone on the run can easily change his appearances—the color and length of his hair, for instance. He could even pass himself off as an Arab and cover his head with a kaffiyeh. I need to have someone with me who could pick him out of a crowd if she only saw his seaweed-green eyes.”

“That more or less narrows it down to me,” Stella agreed.

1997: MINH SLEEPWALKS THROUGH ONE-NIGHT STANDS

DRESSED IN LOOSE-FITTING SILK PANTS AND A HIGH-NECKED SILK blouse with a dragon embroidered on the back, Minh was clearing away the last of the dirty lunch dishes when Tsou Xing poked his head through the kitchen doors and asked her if she would run upstairs and check Martin’s beehives. He would do it himself, he said, but he was expecting a delivery of Formosan beer and wanted to count the cartons before they stored them in the cellar to make sure he wasn’t being short changed. Sure, Minh said. No problem. She opened the cash register and retrieved Martin’s keys and headed for the street, glad to have a few minutes to herself. She wondered if Tsou suspected that she had slept with Martin. She thought she’d spotted something resembling a leer in his old eyes when Tsou raised the subject of their upstairs’ neighbor earlier that week; he had been speaking in English but had referred to Martin using the Chinese word for hermit. Where you think yin shi goes when he goes? Tsou had asked. Minh had hunched her muscular shoulders into a shrug. It’s not part of my job to keep track of the customers, she’d replied testily. No reason climb on high horse, Tsou had said, whisking a fly from the bar with the back of his only hand. Not a crime to think you could know, okay? And he had smiled so wickedly that the several gold teeth in his mouth flashed into view. Well, I don’t know and I couldn’t care less, Minh had insisted. Pivoting on a heel, she had stalked off so Tsou would get the message: She didn’t appreciate his sticking his nose into her love life, or lack of same.

Now Minh rubbed her sleeve across the private-eye logo on Martin’s front door to clean the rain stains off of it, then let herself in and, taking the steps two at a time, climbed to the pool parlor. Actually, she did wonder where Martin had gone off to; wondered, too, why he hadn’t left a message for her as well as Tsou. She attributed it to Martin’s shyness; he would have been mortified if he thought Tsou had gotten wind of their relationship, assuming you could call their very occasional evenings together a relationship. She meandered through the pool parlor, brushing her fingers over his Civil War guns and the folders on his desk and the unopened cartons that contained heaven knows what. Soon after he’d moved in she had asked him if he wanted help opening them. He’d kicked at one of the cartons and had said he didn’t need to open them, he knew what was inside. The reply struck her as being very in character.