Legends

“If your sister’s husband went missing in Israel, why are you looking for him in America?”

“We think that’s one of the places he might have headed for when he left Israel.”

“We?”

“My father, the Russian who calls World War Two the Great Patriotic War.”

“What are the other places?”

“My sister’s husband had business associates in Moscow and Uzbekistan. He seems to have been involved in some kind of project in Prague. He had stationary with a London letterhead.”

“Start at the start,” Martin ordered.

Stella Kastner hiked herself up on the edge of the pool table that Martin used as a desk. “Here’s the story,” she said, crossing her legs at the ankles, toying with the lowest unbuttoned button on her shirt. “My half-sister, Elena, she’s my father’s daughter by his first wife, turned religious and joined the Lubavitch sect here in Crown Heights soon after we immigrated to America, which was in 1988. Several years ago the rabbi came to my father and proposed an arranged marriage with a Russian Lubavitcher who wanted to immigrate to Israel. He didn’t speak Hebrew and was looking for an observant wife who spoke Russian. My father had mixed feelings about Elena leaving Brooklyn, but it was my sister’s dream to live in Israel and she talked him into giving his consent. For reasons that are too complicated to go into, my father wasn’t free to travel so it was me who accompanied Elena when she flew to Israel. We took a sharoot”—she noticed Martin’s frown of confusion—“that’s a communal taxi, we took it to the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba on the West Bank next to Hebron. Elena, who changed her name to Ya’ara when she set foot in Israel, was married an hour and a quarter after the plane landed by the rabbi there, who had emigrated from Crown Heights ten years before.”

“Tell me about this Russian your sister married sight unseen.”

“His name was Samat Ugor-Zhilov. He was neither tall nor short but somewhere between the two, and thin despite the fact that he asked for seconds at mealtime and snacked between meals. It must have been his metabolism. He was the high strung type, always on the move. His face looked as if it had been caught in a vise—it was long and thin and mournful—he always managed to look as if he were grieving over the death of a close relative. The pupils of his eyes were seaweed-green, the eyes themselves were utterly devoid of emotion—cold and calculating would be the words I’d use to describe them. He dressed in expensive Italian suits and wore shirts with his initials embroidered on the pocket. I never saw him wearing a tie, not even at his own wedding.”

“You would recognize him if you saw him again?”

“That’s a strange question. He could cover his head like an Arab—as long as I could see his eyes, I could pick him out of a crowd.”

“What did he do by way of work?”

“If you mean work in the ordinary sense of the term, nothing. He’d bought a new split-level house on the edge of Kiryat Arba for cash, or so the rabbi whispered in my ear as we were walking to the synagogue for the wedding ceremony. He owned a brand new Japanese Honda and paid for everything, at least in front of me, with cash. I stayed in Kiryat Arba for ten days and I came back again two years later for ten days, but I never saw him go to the synagogue to study Torah, or to an office like some of the other men in the settlement. There were two telephones and a fax machine in the house and it seemed as if one of them was always ringing. Some days he’d lock himself in the upstairs bedroom and talk on the phone for hours at a stretch. The few times he talked on the phone in front of me he switched to Armenian.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh what?”

“Sounds like one of those new Russian capitalists you read about in the newspapers. Did your sister have children?”

Stella shook her head. “No. To tell you the awful truth, I’m not positive they ever consummated the marriage.” She slid to the floor and went over to the window to stare out at the street. “The fact is I don’t fault him for leaving her. I don’t think Elena—I never got used to calling her Ya’ara—has the vaguest idea how to please a man. Samat probably ran off with a bleached blonde who gave him more pleasure in bed.”

Martin, listening listlessly, perked up. “You make the same mistake most women make. If he ran off with another woman, it’s because he was able to give her more pleasure in bed.”

Stella turned back to gaze at Martin. Her eyes tightened into a narrower squint. “You don’t talk like a detective.”

“Sure I do. It’s the kind of thing Bogart would have said to convince a client that under the hard boiled exterior resided a sensitive soul.”

“If that’s what you’re trying to do, it’s working.”

“I have a question: Why doesn’t your sister get the local rabbi to testify that her husband ran out on her and divorce him in absentia?”