“I don’t. It’s for fuses.”
“Fuses as in electricity?”
“Fuses as in bombs.”
She opened the lid. “These look like paper shotgun cartridges.”
“Fuses, paper cartridges need to be kept dry.”
She threw him an anxious look and went on with her inspection. “You’re not crawling in creature comforts,” she noted, her words drifting back over her shoulder as she took a turn around the wide floor-boards.
Martin thought of all the safe houses he had lived in, furnished in ancient Danish modern; he suspected the CIA must have bought can openers and juice makers and toilet bowl brushes by the thousands because they were the same in every safe house. And because they were safe houses, none of them had been perfectly safe. “It’s a mistake to possess comfortable things,” he said now. “Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don’t settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.” Flashing a wrinkled smile, he added, “This is especially true for those of us who limp.”
Looking through the open door into the back room, the woman caught a glimpse of crumpled newspapers around the Army cot. “What’s with all the newspapers on the floor?” she asked.
Hearing her speak, Martin was reminded how satisfyingly musical an ordinary human voice could be. “I picked up that little trick from The Maltese Falcon—fellow named Thursby kept newspapers around his bed so no one could sneak up on him when he slept.” His patience was wearing thin. “I learned everything I know about being a detective from Humphrey Bogart.”
The woman came full circle and stopped in front of Martin; she studied his face but couldn’t tell if he was putting her on. She was having second thoughts about hiring someone who had learned the detective business from Hollywood movies. “Is it true detectives were called gumshoes?” she said, eyeing his bare feet. She backed up to the pool table covered with muzzle-loading firearms and powder horns and Union medals pinned to a crimson cushion, trying to figure out what fiction she could come up with that would get her out of there without hurting his feelings. At a loss for words, she absently ran her fingers along the brass telescopic sight on an antique rifle. “My father collects guns from the Great Patriotic War,” she remarked.
“Uh-huh. That makes your father Russian. In America we call it World War Two. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch the weapons.” He added, “That one’s an English Whitworth. It was the rifle of choice of Confederate sharpshooters. The paper cartridges in the humidor are for the Whitworth. During the Civil War Whitworth cartridges were expensive, but a skilled sniper could hit anything he could see with the weapon.”
“You some sort of Civil War buff?” she asked.
“My alter ego is,” he said. “Look, we’ve made enough small talk. Bite the bullet, lady. You must have a name.”
Her left palm drifted up to cover the triangle of skin on her chest. “I’m Estelle Kastner,” she announced. “The precious few friends I have call me Stella.”
“Who are you?” Martin persisted, quarrying for deeper layers of identity than a name.
The question startled her; there was clearly more to him than met the eye, which raised the prospect that he might be able to help her after all. “Listen, Martin Odum, there are no shortcuts. You want to find out who I am, you’re going to have to put in time.”
Martin settled back against the banister. “What is it you hope I can do for you?”
“I hope you can find my sister’s husband, who’s gone AWOL from his marriage.”
“Why don’t you try the police? They have a missing person’s bureau that specializes in this sort of thing.”
“Because the police in question are in Israel. And they have more pressing things to do than hunt for missing husbands.”
“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?”