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?”
“That’s the problem,” Stella said. “In Israel a religious woman needs to have a divorce handed down by a religious court before she can go on with her life. The divorce is called a get. Without a get, a Jewish woman remains an agunah, which means a chained woman, unable to remarry under Jewish law; even if she remarries under civil law her children will still be considered bastards. And the only way a woman can obtain a get is for the husband to show up in front of the rabbis of a religious court and agree to the divorce. There’s no other way, at least not for religious people. There are dozens of Hasidic husbands who disappear each year to punish their wives—they go off to America or Europe. Sometimes they live under assumed names. Go find them if you can! Under Jewish law the husband is permitted to live with a woman who’s not his wife, but the wife doesn’t have the same right. She can’t marry again, she can’t live with a man, she can’t have children.”
“Now I’m beginning to see why you need the services of a detective. How long ago did this Samat character skip out on your sister?”
“It’ll be two months next weekend.”
“And it’s only now that you’re trying to hire a detective?”
“We didn’t know for sure he wasn’t coming back until he didn’t come back. Then we wasted time trying the hospitals, the morgues, the American and Russian embassies in Israel, the local police in Kiryat Arba, the national police in Tel Aviv. We even ran an ad in the newspaper offering a reward for information.” She tossed a shoulder. “I’m afraid we don’t have much experience tracking down missing persons.”
“You said earlier that your father and you thought Samat might head for America. What made you decide that?”
“It’s the phone calls. I caught a glimpse once of his monthly phone bill—it was several thousand shekels, which is big enough to put a dent in a normal bank account. I noticed that some of the calls went to the same number in Brooklyn. I recognized the country and area code—1 for America, 718 for Brooklyn—because it’s the same as ours on President Street.”
“You didn’t by any chance copy down the number?”
She shook her head in despair. “It didn’t occur to me …”
“Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t know this Samat character was going to run out on your sister.” He saw her look quickly away. “Or did you?”
“I never thought the marriage would last. I didn’t see him burying himself in Kiryat Arba for the rest of his life. He was too involved in the world, too dynamic, too attractive—”
“You found him attractive?”
“I didn’t say I found him attractive,” she said defensively. “I could see how he might appeal to certain women. But not my sister. She’d never been naked in front of a man in her life. As far as I know she’d never seen a naked man. Even when she saw a fully clothed man she averted her eyes. When Samat looked at a woman he stared straight into her eyes without blinking; he undressed her. He claimed to be a religious Jew but I think now it may have been some kind of cover, a way of getting into Israel, of disappearing into the world of the Hasidim. I never saw him lay tefillin, I never saw him go to the synagogue, I never saw him pray the way religious Jews do four times a day. He didn’t kiss the mezuzah when he came into the house the way my sister did. Elena and Samat lived in different worlds.”
“You have photographs of him?”
“When he disappeared, my sister’s photo album disappeared with him. I have one photo I took the day they were married—I sent it to my father, who framed it and hung it over the mantle.” Retrieving her satchel, she pulled a brown envelope from it and carefully extracted a black and white photograph. She stared at it for a moment, the ghost of an anguished smile deforming her lips, then offered it to Martin.
Martin stepped back and held up his palms. “Did Samat ever touch this?”
She thought a moment. “No. I had the film developed in the German Colony in Jerusalem and mailed it to my father from the post office across the street from the photo shop. Samat didn’t know it existed.”
Martin accepted the photo and tilted it toward the daylight. The bride, a pale and noticeably overweight young woman dressed in white satin with a neck-high bodice, and the groom, wearing a starched white shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple and a black suit jacket flung casually over his shoulders, stared impassively into the camera. Martin imagined Stella crying out the Russian equivalent of “Cheese” to pry a smile out of them, but it obviously hadn’t worked; the body language—the bride and groom were standing next to each other but not touching—revealed two strangers at a wake, not a husband and wife after a wedding ceremony. Samat’s face had all but disappeared behind a shaggy black beard and mustache. Only his eyes, storm-dark with anger, were visible. He was obviously irritated, but at what? The religious ceremony that had gone on too long? The prospect of marital bliss in a West Bank oubliette with a consenting Lubavitcher for cellmate?
“How tall is your sister?” Martin inquired.
“Five foot four. Why?”
“He’s slightly taller, which would make him five foot six or seven.”
“Mind if I ask you something?” Stella said.
“Ask, ask,” Martin said impatiently.
“How come you’re not taking notes?”
“There’s no reason to. I’m not taking notes because I’m not taking the case.”
Stella’s heart sank. “For God’s sake, why? My father’s ready to pay you whether you find him or not.”
“I’m not taking the case,” Martin announced, “because it’d be easier to find a needle in a field of haystacks than your sister’s missing husband.”
“You could at least try,” Stella groaned.
“I’d be wasting your father’s money and my time. Look, Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the century grew beards like your sister’s husband. It’s a trick illegals have used since Moses dispatched spies to explore the enemy order of battle at Jericho. You live with the beard long enough, people identify you with the beard. The day you want to disappear, you do what the Russian revolutionaries did—you shave it off. Your own wife couldn’t pick you out of a police lineup afterward. For argument’s sake, let’s say Samat was one of those gangster capitalists you hear so much about these days. Maybe things got too hot for your future ex-brother-in-law in Moscow the year he turned up in Kiryat Arba to marry your half sister. Chechen gangs, working out of that monster of a hotel across from the Kremlin—it’s called the Rossiya, if I remember right—were battling the Slavic Alliance to see who would control the lucrative protection rackets in the capital. There were shootouts every day as the gangs fought over territories. Witnesses to the shootouts were gunned down before they could go to the police. People going to work in the morning discovered men hanging by their necks from lampposts. Maybe Samat is Jewish, maybe he’s an Armenian Apostolic Christian. It doesn’t really matter. He buys a birth certificate certifying his mother is Jewish—they’re a dime a dozen on the black market—and applies to get into Israel. The paperwork can take six or eight months, so to speed things up your brother-in-law has a rabbi arrange a marriage with a female Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. It’s the perfect cover story, the perfect way to disappear from view until the gang wars in Moscow peter out. From his split level safe house in a West Bank settlement, he keeps in touch with his business partners; he buys and sells stocks, he arranges to export Russian raw materials in exchange for Japanese computers or American jeans. And then one bright morning, when things in Russia have calmed down, he decides he’s had enough of his Israeli dungeon. He doesn’t want his wife or the rabbis or the state of Israel asking him where he’s going, or looking him up when he gets there, so he grabs his wife’s photo album and shaves off his beard and, slipping out of Israel, disappears from the face of the planet earth.”