Legends

1997: OSKAR ALEXANDROVICH KASTNER DISCOVERS THE WEIGHT OF A CIGARETTE

THE TWO MEN IN CON-ED UNIFORMS PARKED THEIR REPAIR TRUCK in the narrow alley between President and Carroll and made their way on foot to the only back garden on the block protected by a chainlink fence. One of the men muttered something into a walkie-talkie, listened for a response and nodded to his colleague when he heard it. The second man produced a key, opened the door in the fence and used the same key to switch off the alarm box inside. The two, walking soundlessly on crepe soled shoes, climbed the stairs to the porch. Using a second key, they let themselves into the kitchen at the rear of the house and punched the code into the alarm there. They stood motionless for several minutes, their eyes fixed on the ceiling. When they heard the muffled scrape of a wheelchair rolling along a hallway over their heads, the two men produced pistols fitted with silencers and started up the back staircase. Reaching the first floor, they could hear a radio playing in the front room. Gripping their pistols with both hands, angling the barrels up, they worked their way along the hall to the closed door and flattened themselves against the wall on either side of it. One of the men tapped the side of his nose to indicate he had gotten a whiff of foul smelling cigarette smoke; their quarry was inside the room. Baring his teeth in a tight smile, his companion grasped the knob and flung open the door and the two of them, hunched over to keep their profiles low, burst into the room.

Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner, sitting in his wheelchair next to the window, was oiling the firing mechanism on a Soviet PPSh 41, a Second World War automatic weapon in mint condition. Smoke coiled up from a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Kastner’s heavy lidded eyes blinked slowly as he took in the intruders. One appeared much older than the other but the younger man, gesturing to the other to shut the door, seemed to be in charge.

“Vy Russky?” Kastner inquired.

“Da. Ya Russky,” replied the younger Con-Ed man. “I gdye vasha doch?”

Kastner eyed the pearl-handled Tula-Tokarev on the table, a 1930s pistol that he always kept charged, but he knew he could never reach it. “Ya ne znayu,” he replied. He was not about to tell them that Stella was on her way to Israel, accompanied by a CIA agent turned detective who lived over a Chinese restaurant. He wondered how the two killers had broken through the chainlink fence and gotten into the kitchen without tripping the alarms. “You took your time getting here,” Kastner growled in English. “Nine years.” He set the PPSh down and, working the joystick, maneuvered the wheelchair so that his back was to the intruders.

“Kto vas poslal?” he asked.

“Oligarkh,” the younger gunman said with a ruthless snicker.

Gazing out the window, Kastner caught sight of two small Lubavitch boys, dressed in black like their fathers, hurrying down the street. He knew from Elena that they expected the Messiah to appear at any moment and redeem mankind. Maybe this Messiah had turned up and the boys were actually angels on their way to welcome him. He himself would surely end up where angels fear to tread, as that song Stella played on the Victrola put it. Kastner gasped when he felt the needle prick the skin of his back next to the shoulder blade. In his day the KGB specialists in wetwork had favored a tasteless, colorless rat poison that thinned the blood and brought breathing to an abrupt halt. The Oligarkh’s hit men would surely be using something more sophisticated and less traceable; perhaps one of those newfangled adrenalin-like substances that caused widespread gastric bleeding and, eventually, death, or, better still, a clotting agent that blocked a coronary artery and triggered what doctors called a myocardial infarction and laymen referred to as a heart attack. On the off-chance that one of the angels might ask him to identify himself, Kastner tried to recollect what his name had been before the FBI assigned the pseudonym Oskar. It irritated him that he was unable to remember what his mother had called him as a child. If he could suck on his cigarette, it would surely calm his nerves long enough for the name to come back to him. Moving languidly, as if he were underwater, Kastner reached for the ashtray. With great concentration he managed to pinch the cigarette between his thumb and two fingers, only to discover that it was too heavy to lift.

1987: DANTE PIPPEN BECOMES AN IRA BOMBER