Legends

Akim’s voice shed its laziness. “Pippen was an agent for the American Central Intelligence Agency who infiltrated the Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley posing as a freelance explosive expert with connections to the IRA. You and the CIA are said to have parted company, though I am embarrassed to say none of my sources knows why. You are startled to see how well informed I am, right? You see, in Israel, as in every civilized country, information can be purchased as easily as toothpaste. Now you claim to be a Brooklyn, New York, detective named Odum. There are some who think this is simply another fabricated identity. There are others who say Odum is who you were before you were Pippen.”

“I did work for the CIA once. I no longer do. Odum is as close to the real me as I can get.”

Akim accepted this with a wary nod. “Time for my insulin shot,” he announced. He beckoned with a pinky bearing a heavy gold ring with a diamond set into it. Martin followed him down the narrow steps and across the lawn, past the swimming pool where three women in diaphanous dresses with low necklines were playing mahjongg; he suddenly longed for the days when he investigated uncomplicated things like mahjongg debts and kidnapped dogs and Chechen-run crematoriums in Little Odessa. He must have been off his rocker to think he could trace a husband who had jumped ship. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child’s play by comparison. Akim reached the shaded veranda behind the mansion and motioned Martin to one of the deck chairs. Two of Akim’s Armenians, wearing sports jackets that didn’t conceal the automatic pistols in their shoulder holsters, stood nearby. A male nurse dressed in a white hospital smock was squirting liquid through a needle to expel any air left in the syringe. Akim collapsed into a deck chair and tugged the tails of his shirt out of his trousers to bare a bulging stomach. He sipped fresh orange juice through a plastic straw as the male nurse jabbed the needle under his dry skin and injected the insulin.

“Thanks a lot, Earl. See you tomorrow morning.”

“My pleasure, Mr. Zhitkin.”

When the male nurse was out of ear shot, Akim said, “As you can see I still use the name Zhitkin from time to time. Funny how you become attached to an alias that saved your life.” At the pool, one of the women shrieked with pleasure. Akim burst out angrily, “Keep it quiet, ladies. Don’t you see I have a visitor?” Massaging the spot on his stomach where the insulin had been injected, he said, “So what do you think I can do for you, Mr. Pippen or Mr. Odum or whatever your name is today?”

“I really am a detective,” Martin said. “I was hired to find your nephew, Samat, who seems to have skipped out on his wife. I was hoping you would tell me where to start looking.”

“What’s she want, the wife, alimony payments? A piece of his bank account, assuming he has got a bank account? What?”

“I was hired by the wife’s sister and father—”

“Who is a dead man now.”

“You are well informed. They hired me to find Samat and get him to give her a divorce. She’s religious. Without the divorce she can’t marry again, can’t have children with another man.”

Akim tucked the tails of his shirt back into his trousers. “You have met the wife in question?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You have seen how she dresses? Who would marry her? Who would fuck her even to have children?”

“She’s young. She may even be a virgin. The rabbi who married her thinks she and Samat never slept together.”

Akim waved his hand in disgust. “Rabbi needs to stick to the bible. I do not want to hear private things about my nephew. Who he fucks—whether he fucks—is not my business.”

Another Armenian shouted something in a strange language from the driveway guard house. Akim said, “My people want to turn on the spotlights after dark, but the neighbors complain to the police. Every time we turn them on the police come around and order us to turn them off. What kind of a country is this where a man of means cannot light up the wall around his property? It is like as if they personally hold being rich against me.”

Martin said, “Maybe what they hold against you is the way you got rich.”

“I am starting to like you,” Akim admitted. “You talk to me the way I talked to people like me when I was your age. Fact is if I did not get rich, someone else would have got rich in my place. Making money was the only thing to do when the Soviet Union disintegrated—it was a matter of not drowning in Gorbachev’s perestroika, because only the rich were able to keep their heads above water. Anyway, America brought it on, the collapse, the gangsters, the mob wars, all of it.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re driving at,” Martin remarked.