Legends

The rabbi bounded to his feet when the women appeared at the door; Ya’ara stopped to kiss the mezuzah before she came in. Grabbing one of her hands in both of his, bending at the waist so that his head was level with hers, the rabbi bombarded her with a burst of Hebrew which, to the shamus’s ear, sounded more Brooklyn than biblical. Martin concluded that the rabbi was offering condolences because Ya’ara started sobbing again; tears cascaded down her cheeks and soaked into the tightly buttoned collar of her blouse. Ben Zion led Ya’ara to the yortseit candle and, rocking back and forth on the soles of his sneakers, started praying in Hebrew. Ya’ara, blotting her tears on the back of a sleeve, joined in.

“Aren’t you going to pray for your father?” Martin whispered to Stella.

“I only pray for the living,” she retorted fiercely.

When the prayer ended the rabbi excused himself to organize the Sabbath pilgrimage to the Cave of Machpela, and Martin got his first opportunity to talk to Stella’s sister. “I’m sorry about your father,” he began.

She accepted this with a shy closing of her lids. “I was not expecting him to die, and certainly not of a heart attack. He had the heart of a lion. After all he had been through—” She shrugged weakly.

“Your sister has hired me to find Samat so that you can get a religious divorce.”

Ya’ara turned on Stella. “What good will a divorce do me?”

“It is a matter of pride,” Stella insisted. “You can’t let him get away with this.”

Martin steered the conversation back to matters of tradecraft. “Do you have anything of his—a book he once read, a telephone he once used, a bottle of alcohol he once poured a drink from, a toothbrush even? Anything at all?”

Ya’ara shook her head. “There was stationery with a London letterhead but it disappeared and I don’t remember the address on it. Samat filled a trunk with personal belongings and paid two boys to carry it down to the taxi when he left. He even took the photographs of our wedding. The only photograph left of him was the one Stella snapped after the ceremony and sent to our father.” At the mention of their father, tears trickled down her cheeks again. “How could Samat do this to a wife, I ask you?”

“Stella told me he was always talking on the phone,” Martin said. “Did he initiate the calls or did people call him?”

“Both.”

“So there must be phone records showing the numbers he dialed.”

Again she shook her head. “The rabbi asked the security office here to try and get the phone numbers. Someone even drove to Tel Aviv to interview the phone company. He reported back that the numbers were all on a magnetic tape that had been erased by error. There was no trace of the numbers he called.”

“What language did he use when he spoke on the phone?”

“English. Russian. Armenian sometimes.”

“Did you ever ask him what he did for a living?”

“Once.”

Stella said, “What did he say?”

“At first he didn’t answer. When I pressed him, he told me he ran a business selling Western-manufactured artificial limbs to people who had lost legs to Russian land mines in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kurdistan. He said he could have made a fortune but was selling them at cost.”

“And you believed him?” Stella asked.

“I had no reason not to.” Ya’ara’s eyes suddenly widened. “Someone once called when he wasn’t here and left a phone number for him to call back. I thought it might have something to do with these artificial limbs and wrote it down on the first thing that came to hand, which was the back of a recipe, and then copied it onto the pad next to the telephone. I tore off the page and gave it to Samat when he returned to the house that day and he went to the bedroom and dialed a number. I remember that the conversation was very agitated. At one point Samat was even yelling into the phone, and he kept switching from English to Russian and back to English again.”

“The recipe,” Stella said softly. “Do you still have it?”

Both Stella and Martin could see Ya’ara hesitate. “You would not be betraying your husband,” Martin said. “If and when we find him, we are only going to make sure you get the famous get so you can go on with your life.”

“Samat owes that much to you,” Stella said.

Sighing, moving as if her limbs were weighted down by gravity, Ya’ara pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen alcove and pulled a tin box from one of the wall cupboards. She carried it back to the living room, set it on the folding table, opened the lid and began thumbing through printed recipes that she had torn out of Elle magazine over the years. She pulled the one for apple strudel out of the box and turned it over. A phone number starting with the country code 44 and city code 171 was scrawled on the back in pencil. Martin produced a felt tipped pen and copied the number into a small notebook.

“Where is that?” Stella asked Martin.

“Forty-four is England, 171 is London,” he said. He turned back to Stella. “Did Samat ever leave Kiryat Arba?” he asked.