“You are thinking so hard, smoke is emerging from your ears,” Kastner said with a laugh. “What conclusion have you reached?”
“I like you, too,” Martin declared. “I like your father,” he told Stella. “Fact is, he wouldn’t have lasted long in the CIA. He is far too idealistic for a shop that prides itself on the virtuosity of its pragmatists. Unlike your father, Americans aren’t interested in constructing a Utopia, for the simple reason they believe they’re living in one.”
Stella seemed stunned. “I like that you like Kastner, and for the right reasons,” she said softly.
Kastner, his nerves frayed, swiveled his wheelchair to one side and then the other. “It remains for us to put our heads together and figure out why the lady with the pseudonym Fred Astaire does not want my son-in-law, Samat, to be discovered.”
Martin permitted a rare half-smile onto his lips. “To do that I’m going to have to discover Samat.”
Stella disappeared to brew up some tea and hurried back minutes later carrying a tray with a jar of jam and three steaming cups on it. She found her father and Martin, their knees almost touching, deep in conversation. Martin was smoking one of his wafer-thin Beedies. Her father had started another cigarette but held it at arm’s length so the smoke wouldn’t obscure Martin.
“… somehow managed to falsify the records so the Party would not know his mother was Jewish,” Kastner was explaining. “His father was an Armenian doctor and a member of the Party—at one point he was accused of being an enemy of the people and sent to Siberia, where he died. The post-Stalinist program to rehabilitate people falsely accused of crimes counted in Samat’s favor when he applied to the Forestry Institute; the state had killed his father so it felt it had to compensate the son.”
Martin nodded. “I seem to recall reading about your famous Forestry Institute that taught everything except forestry.”
Kastner set aside his cigarette in a saucer and stirred a spoonful of jam into one of the cups. Blowing noisily across it, he sipped at the scalding tea. “It was the secret institute for our space program,” he said. “In the seventies, it was the best place in the Soviet Union to study computer science. Samat went on to do advanced studies at the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. When he graduated near the top of his class, he was drafted into the KGB. Because of his computer skills, he was posted to the Sixth Chief Directorate.”
“You knew him personally?”
“He was assigned to several cases I worked on. He became an expert on money laundering techniques—he knew everything there was to know about off-shore banks and bearer-share business operations. In 1991, when Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev and took power, one of the things he did was break up our Committee for State Security into its component parts, at which point a great many KGB officers found themselves suddenly unemployed and scrambling to make a living. Samat was one of them.”
“You were in America by then. How do you know all this?”
“Your Central Intelligence Agency encouraged me to keep in touch with the Sixth Directorate. They wanted me to recruit agents in place.”
“Did you succeed?”
Kastner flashed a pained smile. Martin said, “I take back the question. So we’re up to where Samat, with the KGB closing down its shop, starts looking at the help wanted ads. What kind of job did he land?”
“He ended up working for one of the rising stars in the private sector, someone who had his own model of how to make the transition from socialism to market-oriented capitalism. His solution was gangster capitalism. He was one of the gangsters the Sixth Chief Directorate kept track of when I was there. Samat, with his knowledge of money laundering techniques, quickly worked his way up to become the organization’s financial wizard. He was the one who brought the shell game to Russia. You have seen the Negroes playing the shell game on street corners down on Rogers Avenue. They fold your ten-dollar bill until it is the size of a walnut and put it under a sea shell and move it around with two other shells. When they stop your ten-dollar bill has disappeared. Samat did the same thing but on a much larger scale.”
“And this is the Russian Lubavitch who wanted to marry your daughter and live in Israel?”
Kastner nodded heavily. “At one point the CIA asked me to try and recruit Samat. They arranged for me to talk with him on the telephone when he was in Geneva. I spoke of a secret account that could be his if he came over. I named a sum of money that would be deposited in this account. He laughed and replied that the sum of money they were suggesting was the loose change in his pocket. He told me the CIA could not afford to pay him a tenth of what he was earning. When Samat returned to Russia he made sure everyone knew the CIA had attempted to recruit him. There was even a satiric article published in Pravda describing the clumsy approach by a defector.”
“When did Samat get in touch with you about marrying your daughter?” Martin asked.
“It was not Samat who contacted Kastner,” Stella said. “Samat’s employer, who happened to be Samat’s uncle—his father’s brother—is the one who got in touch with Kastner.”
Martin looked from one to the other. “And who was Samat’s employer?”
Kastner cleared his throat. “It was Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one known as the Oligarkh.”
“The Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov who was on the cover of Time magazine in the early nineties?”
“There is only one Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,” Kastner remarked with some bitterness.
“You knew that Samat was working for Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov when you agreed to the marriage?”
Kastner looked at his daughter, then dropped his eyes. It was obviously a sore subject between them. Stella answered for her father. “It was not an accident that Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov contacted Kastner—the two of them were acquainted from the days when the Sixth Chief Directorate was keeping track of the new cooperatives.”
“In the early nineteen-eighties,” Kastner explained, “Ugor-Zhilov was a small-time hoodlum in a small pond—he ran a used-car dealership in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He had a KGB record: He’d been arrested in the early seventies for bribery and black market activities and sent to a gulag in the Kolyma Mountains for eight years. Read Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich and you will get a glimpse of what each day of Ugor-Zhilov’s eight years was like. By the time he made his way back to Armenia and scraped together enough money to open the used-car business, he was bitterly anti-Soviet; bitterly anti-Russian, also. He would have faded from our radar screen if he hadn’t set his sights on bigger fish in bigger ponds. He came to Moscow and in a matter of months cornered the used-car market there. One by one he bought out his competitors. Those who would not sell wound up dead or maimed. The punishment handed out by the Oligarkh was what you Americans call cruel and unusual—he believed that it was good for business if his enemies had reason to dread him. When I spoke to Samat in Geneva, he passed on a story that Ugor-Zhilov had actually buried someone alive and had a road paved over him—and this while several dozen workers looked on. The story of the execution may or may not be true—either way it served its purpose. Few Russians were reckless enough to challenge the Oligarkh.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,” Martin observed.