Martin put two and two together. “Oskar Kastner can’t be your real name,” he said, thinking out loud. “A KGB defector living in Brooklyn under an assumed name—there will surely be an elaborate cover story to go with the pseudonym—means that you, like the other Soviet defectors, must be in the FBI’s witness protection program. According to your daughter, you came here in 1988, which means the CIA has long since wrung you dry and probably doesn’t return your calls if you make any. Which suggests that your friend in Washington who gave you my name is your FBI handler.”
So that was how Crystal Quest had gotten wind of Stella’s visit to the pool parlor! Someone in the FBI had heard that an ex-CIA type was playing detective in Crown Heights and passed Martin’s name on to Kastner. The FBI clerks who keep tabs on people in the protection program would have circulated a routine “contact” report when a former KGB officer announced his intention of employing a former CIA officer—even if the case in question had nothing to do with CIA operations. Somewhere in the labyrinthian corridors of Langley, a warning buzzer would have gone off; it had probably been the one wired to Quest’s brain.
Did this mean that Kastner’s missing son-in-law had some connection to past or present CIA operations? Martin decided it was an angle worth considering.
“He is pretty rapid for a long distance runner,” Kastner was telling his daughter. “My FBI friend said you were discharged from the CIA in 1994. He did not explain why, except to say it had nothing to do with stealing money or selling secrets or anything unpleasant like that.”
“I’m relieved you’re both on the same side,” Stella ventured from her perch on the ladder.
Martin batted a palm to disperse Kastner’s cigarette smoke. “Why didn’t you ask the FBI to try and find your missing son-in-law?”
“First thing I tried. They stretched some rules and searched the computer database for missing persons who had turned up dead. Unfortunately none of them fit Samat’s description.”
Martin smiled. “Unfortunately?”
Kastner’s craggy features twisted into a scowl. “I speak American with an accent—Stella never stops correcting me—but I pick my words as if my life depended on their accuracy.”
“I can vouch for Kastner’s accent,” Stella said with a laugh.
“You call your father Kastner?”
“Sure. You’ve already figured out that’s not his real name—it’s the name the FBI gave him when he came into the witness protection program. Calling my father Kastner is a running joke between us. Isn’t it, Kastner?”
“It reminds us who we’re not.”
Martin turned to Stella. “Meeting your father explains a lot.”
“Such as?” she demanded.
“It explains how you played along so quickly when I phoned this morning; you understood that I thought the phone might be tapped. You are your father’s daughter.”
“She was raised to be discreet when it comes to telephones,” Kastner agreed with evident pride. “She knows enough tradecraft to pay attention to people who are window shopping for objects they do not seem likely to buy. Women and fishing rods, for example. Or men and ladies undergarments.”
“You really didn’t need to go around the block twice,” Stella told Martin. “I promise you I wasn’t followed when I came to see you. I wasn’t followed on the way home either.”
“That being the case, how come the folks I used to work for are trying to discourage me from getting involved with missing husbands?”
Kastner manipulated the joystick; the wheelchair jerked toward Martin. “How do you know they know?” he asked quietly.
“A woman named Fred Astaire whispered in my ear.”
Kastner said, “I can see from the look in your eyes that you do not consider this Fred Astaire person to be a friend.”
“It takes a lot of energy to dislike someone. Occasionally I make the effort.”
Stella was following her own thoughts. “Maybe your pool parlor was bugged,” she suggested. “Maybe they hid a microphone in that Civil War rifle of yours.”
Martin shook his head. “If they had bugged my loft, they would have heard me refuse to take the case and not gone out of their way to lean on me.”
Tilting his large head, Kastner thought out loud: “The tip could have come from the FBI—someone there might have routinely informed my CIA conducting officer if it looked as if you might become involved with me. But you probably figured that out already.”
Martin was mightily relieved to hear him reach this conclusion. It underscored his credibility.
Kastner stared at Martin, his jaw screwed up. “Stella told me you refused to take the case. Why did you modify your mind?”
Stella kept her eyes on Martin as she spoke to her father. “He didn’t modify his mind, Kastner. He modified his heart.”
“Respond to the question, if you please,” Kastner instructed his visitor.
“Let’s chalk it up to an unhealthy curiosity—I’d like to know why the CIA doesn’t want this particular missing husband found. That and the fact that I don’t appreciate having an unpleasant woman who munches ice cubes tell me what I can or cannot do.”
“I like you,” Kastner burst out, his face breaking into a lopsided smile. “I like him,” he informed his daughter. “But he would not have gone very far in our Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. He is too much of a loner. We did not trust the loners. We only recruited people who were comfortable serving as cogs in the machine.”
“Which Directorate?” Martin asked.
The bluntness of Martin’s question made Stella wince; in her experience, people talking about intelligence matters usually beat around the bush. “In the USA, Kastner,” she told her father, who was visibly flustered, “they call this talking turkey.”
Kastner cleared his throat. “The Sixth Chief Directorate,” he said, adapting to the situation. “I was the second deputy to the man who ran the Directorate.”
“Uh-huh.”
The Russian looked at his daughter. “What does it mean, uh-huh?”
“It means he is familiar with the Sixth Chief Directorate, Kastner.”
In fact, Martin had more than a passing acquaintance with this particular Directorate. At one point in the late eighties, Lincoln Dittmann had recruited a KGB officer in Istanbul. Lincoln had made his pitch when he heard on the grapevine that the officer’s younger brother had been arrested for being out of step during a military drill; the instructor had acused him of sabotaging the parade to discredit the glorious Red Army. Lincoln had arranged to smuggle the disenchanted KGB officer and his family out of Istanbul in return for a roll of microfilm filled with Sixth Chief Directorate documents. The material provided the CIA with its first inside look into the operations of this up to then secret section. It had been carved out of the KGB Directorate structure back in the sixties to keep track of economic crimes. In 1987, when what the Soviets called “cooperatives” and the world referred to as “free market enterprises” were legalized by Comrade Gorbachev, the Sixth Chief Directorate shifted gears to keep track of these new businesses. As the economy, crippled by inflation and corruption at the most senior levels of government, began to stall, gangster capitalism thrived; cooperatives had to buy protection—what the Russians called krysha or a roof—from the hundreds of gangs sprouting in Moscow and other cities if they wanted to stay in business. When the Sixth Chief Directorate found it couldn’t crush the gangs and protect the emerging market economy, it simply stopped trying and joined in the free-for-all looting of the country. Martin remembered Stella’s saying that her father had immigrated to America in 1988. If he had been getting rich on the looting, he would have stayed and skimmed off his share. Which meant he was one of those die-hard socialists who blamed Gorbachev and his “restructuring” for wrecking seventy years of Soviet communism. In short, Kastner was probably the rarest of birds, an ardent, if disheartened, Marxist condemned to live out his days in capitalist America.