Legends

“Certainly I know. He fled from Israel for the same reason he fled to Israel. Chechen hit men were after him. Have been since the Great Mob Wars in Moscow. Samat works for the Oligarkh—you’re smart, I’ll give you that, but not so smart that you’ve heard of him.”

Martin couldn’t resist. “Samat’s uncle, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov.”

The old man cackled until the laugh turned into a grating cough. Saliva trickled from a corner of his mouth. He dabbed at it with the handkerchief as he gasped for breath. “You are a smart one. Do you know what happened during the Great Mob War?”

“The Slavic Alliance battled the Chechen gangs. Over territory. Over who controlled what.”

“At the height of the war the Chechens had about five hundred fighters working out of the Rossiya Hotel not far from the Kremlin. The leader of the Chechens was known by his nom de guerre, which was the Ottoman. The Oligarkh arranged to have him and his lady friend at the time kidnapped. Samat was sent to negotiate with the Chechens—if they wanted their leader back they would have to abandon Moscow and settle for some of the smaller cities that the Oligarkh was willing to cede to them. The Chechens said they needed to discuss the matter with the others. Samat decided they were playing for time—even if they agreed, there was no guarantee they would give up Moscow. He persuaded the Oligarkh that the Chechens needed to be taught a lesson. Next morning people going to work found the body of the Ottoman and his lady friend hanging upside down from a lamppost near the Kremlin wall—newspapers compared it to the death of Mussolini and his mistress in the closing days of the Great Patriotic War.”

“And you call Samat a philanthropist?”

“We all of us have many sides, my son. That was one side of Samat. The other was selling prostheses at cost to provide limbs to land-mine victims. I was one person before I stepped on the land mine and another after. What about you, Mr. Odum? Are you one dimensional or do you have multiple personalities like the rest of us?”

Martin brought a hand up to his forehead to contain the migraine throbbing like the trains pulling into and out of the station. Across the room the old man carefully pulled another cigarette from a desk drawer and lit it with a wooden match, which he ignited with a flick of his fingernail. Once again the smog of a rain cloud rose over his head. “Who is paying you to find Samat, Mr. Odum?”

Martin explained about the wife Samat had abandoned in Israel; how she needed to find her husband so he could grant her a religious divorce in front of a rabbinical court. Puffing away on his cigarette, Rabbani thought about this. “Not like Samat to abandon a wife like that,” he decided. “If he ran for it, it means the Chechens tracked him to that Jew colony next to Hebron. Chechens have long knives and long memories—I’ve been told some of them carry photographs cut from the newspapers of the Ottoman and his lady hanging upside down from a Moscow lamppost. The Chechens must have been knocking on Samat’s door, figuratively speaking, for him to cut and run.” Rabbani hauled open another drawer and retrieved a metal box, which he opened with a key attached to the fob of the gold watch in his vest pocket. He took out a wad of English bank notes and dropped them on the edge of the desk nearest Martin. “I would like to find Samat before the Chechens catch up with him. I would like to help him. He does not need money—he has access to all the money he could ever want. But he does need friends. I could arrange for him to disappear into a new identity; into a new life even. So will you work for me, Mr. Odum? Will you find Samat and tell him that Taletbek Rabbani stands ready to come to the assistance of his friend?”

“If Samat is being hunted by the Chechens, helping him could come back to haunt you.”

Rabbani reached for one of the canes and tapped it against his false limb. “I owe Samat my leg. And my leg has become my life. A Panjshiri never turns his back on such a debt, my son.”

Martin pushed himself to his feet and walked over to the desk and fanned the stack of banknotes as if it were a deck of cards. Then he collected them and shoved them into a pocket. “I hope you are going to tell me where to start to look.”

The old man picked up the pencil, scratched something on the back of an envelope and handed it to Martin. “Samat came here after he left Israel—he wanted to touch base with the projects to which he was especially attached. He stayed two days, then took a plane to Prague. There is an affiliate in Prague—another one of Samat’s pet projects—that’s doing secret work for him on the side. I met one of the directors, a Czech woman, when she came here to see Samat. She gave me her card in case I ever visited Prague.”

“What kind of secret work?”