Martin, an outsider in all of the Crown Heights ghettos, knew enough to keep his head down and avoid looking anyone in the eye when he walked the streets. The sun was up and toasting the crispness out of the air as he made his way down Schenectady, past a large “Rent Strike” sign whitewashed onto a storefront window, past several broken shopping carts with small placards saying they were the property of Throckmorton’s Minimarket on Kingston Avenue, kindly return. His leg with the pinched nerve was starting to ache as he turned onto President, a wide residential street with trees and two-story homes on either side. He stepped off the sidewalk to make way for three Lubavitch women, one more anemic than the other, all of them wearing long skirts and kerchiefs over their shaven heads. They didn’t so much as glance in his direction but went on prattling to each other in a language Martin couldn’t identify. As he neared Kingston, he came abreast of an ambulance with a Jewish Star of David painted on the door, parked in front of a brownstone that had been converted into a synagogue; two pimply young men, with embroidered skull caps on their heads and long sideburns curling down to their jaws, sat in the front seats listening to Bob Dylan on the tape deck.
… Everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred.
Once across Kingston Avenue, Martin began to search for the house numbers. Two thirds of the way down the block, he found the big house that Estelle Kastner had described; a narrow flagstone walk-way led to the side door with the light burning over it. He continued past the house without stopping and turned right on Brooklyn Avenue, and then right again on Union Street, all the while watching the streets for the telltale signs that he was being followed, either by someone on foot or in a car. He felt a certain nostalgia for the good old days in the boondocks when he would have had a sweeper or two trailing after him to make sure he was clean, and tidy up behind him if he wasn’t. Nowadays, he was obliged to make do with rudimentary tradecraft precautions. Streets and alleyways and intersections, the lobbies of buildings with their banks of elevators, the toilets in the backs of restaurants and the windows in the backs of the toilets that looked out on alleyways—he took it all in as if his life might one day depend on remembering what he saw.
Halfway down Union he climbed the front steps of a brownstone and stabbed at the bell. An old man in an undershirt flung open an upstairs window and shouted down, “What’cha want?”
“Looking for a family, name of Grossman,” Martin called back.
“You’re barking up the wrong block,” the man yelled. “The Jewish, they live on President Street. Union is still thanks to God reasonably Roman.” With that he pulled his head back into the house and slammed the window shut.
Martin stood on the stoop for a moment, feigning confusion as he surveyed the street in either direction. Then he doubled back the way he’d come and made his way along President Street to the flagstones that led to the side entrance with the light over it. He was about to knock on the “No Peddlers” sign when the door was pulled open. Stella, wearing tight jeans with a man’s shirt tucked into them, stood inside, squinting up at him. The same three top buttons of her shirt were unbuttoned, revealing the same triangle of pale chest. Strangely, Martin found her more attractive than he remembered. He noticed her hands for the first time; the nails were neither painted nor bitten, the fingers themselves were incredibly long and extremely graceful. Even her chipped front tooth, which had struck him as downright ugly when they met the day before, seemed like an asset.
“Well, if it isn’t the barefoot gumshoe, Martin Odum, Private Eye,” Stella said with a mocking grin. She let him in and slipped his valise under a chair. “In that raincoat,” she said, taking it from him and hanging it on a vestibule hook, “you look like a foreign correspondent from a foreign country. I saw you limp past ten minutes ago,” she announced as she led him up a flight of stairs and into a windowless walk-in closet. “I concluded that your leg must be hurting. I concluded also that you’re paranoid someone might be following you. I’ll bet you didn’t call me from home—I’ll bet you called from a public phone.”
Martin grinned. “There’s a booth on Lincoln and Schenectady that smells like a can of turpentine.”
A booming voice behind Martin exclaimed, “My dear Stella, when will you learn that some paranoids have real enemies. I was watching from an upstairs window when he limped down President Street. Our visitor has the haunted look of someone who would circle the block twice before visiting his mother.”
Martin spun around to confront the corpulent figure wrapped in a terrycloth robe and crammed into a battery-powered wheelchair. Scratching noisily at an unshaven cheek with the nicotine-stained fingers of one hand, working a small joystick with the other, the man piloted himself into the closet, elbowed the door closed behind him and backed up until his back was against the wall. The naked electric bulb, dangling from the ceiling, illuminated his sallow face. Studying it, Martin experienced a twinge of recognition: in one of his incarnations he’d come across a photograph of this man in a counterintelligence scrapbook. But when? And under what circumstances?
“Mr. Martin Odum and me,” the man growled in the grating voice of a chain-smoker, “are birds of a feather. Tradecraft is our Kabala.” He scraped a kitchen match against the wall and sucked a foul smelling cigarette into life. “Which is how come I meet you in this safe room,” he plunged on, taking in with a sweep of his arm the shelves filled with household supplies, the mops and brooms and the vacuum cleaner, the piles of old newspapers waiting to be recycled. “Both of us know there are organizations that can eavesdrop on conversations over the land lines, it does not matter if the phones are on their hooks.”
Stella made a formal introduction. “Mr. Odum, this is my father, Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner.”
Kastner removed a pearl-handled Tula-Tokarev from the pocket of his terrycloth robe and set the handgun down on a shelf. Martin, who understood the value of gestures, accepted Kastner’s decision to disarm with a nod.
All the tradecraft talk had tripped a memory. Suddenly Martin recalled which counterintelligence scrapbook he’d been studying when he came across the face of Stella’s father: it was the one filled with mug shots of Soviet defectors. “Your daughter told me you were Russian,” Martin said lazily. “She didn’t say you were KGB.”
Kastner, nodding excitedly, gestured toward a plastic kitchen stool and Martin scraped it over and settled onto it. Stella leaned back against a folded stepladder, half sitting on one of its steps. “You are a quick wit, Mr. Martin Odum,” Kastner conceded, his bushy brows dancing over his heavy lidded eyes. “My body has slowed down but my brain is still functioning correctly, which is how come I am still cashing my annuity checks. It goes without saying but I will anyhow say it: I checked you out before I sent Stella over to test the temperature of the water.”
“There aren’t that many people in the neighborhood you could have checked me out with,” Martin observed, curious to identify Kastner’s sources.
“Your name was suggested to me by someone in Washington, who assured me you were overqualified for any job I might propose. To be on the safe side, I made discreet inquiries—I talked with a Russian in Little Odessa whose ex-wife stole his Rottweiler when he missed some alimony payments. The person in question compared you to a long distance runner. He told me once you started something you finished it.”