Legends

Martin found a pub at the top of Golders Green and slid into a booth at the back. The waitress, a skinny young thing with one ear and one nostril and one eyebrow pierced and her navel visible below her short T-shirt, came around with the menu printed in chalk on a small blackboard. Martin ordered the special of the day and a half-pint of lager. He was sipping the lager and waiting for the special when there was a commotion in the front of the pub. People abandoned the bar and their tables to gather under the television on an overhead shelf. The screen was not facing the back of the pub so Martin couldn’t make out what was being said. When the waitress came around with the pot pie and chips, he asked her what was happening.

“People’ve been murdered in a warehouse stone’s throw from ’ere. Most exciting thing that’s ‘appened on Golders Green in a month of Sundays, don’t you know. That’s what all them police sirens was about.”

Martin went around to the front of the pub and caught the end of the news item. “A warehouse, located immediately behind the train station, was the grisly scene of the multiple murders,” the male anchor said. “According to municipal records, the warehouse was being used as a depot for prostheses being shipped by a humanitarian group called Soft Shoulder to war ravaged countries.” The female anchor chimed in: “We’re now being told that three bodies were removed from the warehouse. They were identified as a Mr. Taletbek Rabbani, aged eighty-eight, an Afghan refugee who directed the humanitarian operation and who bled to death from a knife wound to his neck while tied to an overhead pipe; his associate, an Egyptian known only as Rachid, who was killed by a single shot to the head; and a secretary, Mrs. Doris Rainfield, who was also shot to death. A fourth woman is missing and police fear she may have been kidnapped by the team of hit men when they fled the scene of the crime. She was identified as Mrs. Froth, and was said to be the wife of the well known snooker player Nigel Froth.”

Returning to his table, Martin found he’d lost all appetite for the pot pie. He raised a finger and caught the waitress’s eye and called, “Whiskey, neat. Make that a double.”

He was nursing the whiskey and his bruised emotions when he suddenly remembered what it was about the three men in orange jumpsuits at the warehouse that had troubled him. Of course! Why hadn’t he seen it sooner? They had all been clean shaven. The upper halves of their faces had been ruddy, as if they’d spent most of their waking hours outdoors. But the lower halves had been the color of sidewalk—one of the men had razor nicks on his skin—which suggested that they had only recently shaved off thick beards in order to make it more difficult to identify them as Muslims.

Martin closed his eyes and summoned up an image of Taletbek Rabbani suspended from an overhead pipe while an assassin stabbed him in the neck. Trying to pick up Samat’s trail, the Chechens, beardless in London, had come back to haunt the old one-legged Tajik warrior sooner than he’d imagined.

1994: THE ONLY FODDER WAS CANNON FODDER

“WHEN WE LEFT OFF LAST WEEK, MARTIN,” DR. TREFFLER WAS saying, “you were commenting on the fact”—her eyes flicked down to the notes in her loose-leaf notebook—“that you are able to do some things well the first time you try.”

The Company psychiatrist, wearing a tight skirt cut above the knee, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. As her thigh flashed into view, Martin turned his head away. He understood that everything she did had a purpose; the business with the legs was her way of harvesting information about his sex drive, assuming he had a sex drive. He wondered what another psychiatrist would make of Dr. Treffler’s way of taking notes, filling the loose-leaf pages from top to bottom and edge to edge with a runty scrawl, the letters all leaning into some nonexistent emotional blizzard. Solzhenitsyn had written Ivan Denisovich that way, but he’d been coming off eight years in Stalin’s gulag. What was her excuse? What did it mean when you didn’t like margins?

“Yes, I remember now,” Martin said finally. Through the panes of the window and the green metal mesh (put there to keep clients from jumping?) he could make out a bit of Maryland countryside; could see the last brown leaves clinging to the branches of trees. He felt an instinctive admiration for their tenacity. “It’s always intrigued me,” he continued because she expected him to; because she sat there with her legs crossed and her thigh visible and her Mont Blanc fountain pen poised over the loose-leaf page. “It struck me as funny how some things you do, you do them well the first time.”

“Such as?” she inquired in a voice so toneless it betrayed absolutely no curiosity about the answer.