“Quit.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Quit. Forget Samat. Concentrate on locating me.”
“What about your father?”
“What’s Kastner have to do with your deciding to quit?”
“He hired me. He’s dead, which means he can’t unhire me.” Martin reached again for her wrist but she snatched it back. “I haven’t come all this way to quit now,” he insisted.
“You’re crazy.” She noticed the expression on his face. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. You’re not crazy crazy. You are imperfectly sane. Admit it, your behavior is sometimes borderline. In your shoes anyone else would shrug and get on with his life.”
“You mean his lives.”
Martin reached again for her wrist. This time she didn’t pull away. He fingered her watch and began absently winding the stem. “Samat’s in America,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
He produced the picture postcard and told her how he had tracked Samat from Israel to London to Prague to Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea to the Lithuanian village of Zuzovka, and finally to the village of Prigorodnaia not far from Moscow where Samat’s mother, Kristyna, lived in the empty dacha once owned by the most hated man in Russia, Lavrenti Beria. “She told me she was a raving lunatic when she needed to be,” Martin said. “She told me she wrapped herself in lunacy the way a peasant pulls a sheepskin coat over his shoulders in winter.”
“Sounds to me like a survival strategy.” Stella examined the photograph on the postcard—the men and boys attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls wearing ankle-length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin. She turned it over and translated the message. “Mama dearest, I am alive and well in America the Beautiful … Your devoted S.” She noticed the printed caption had been scraped off. “Where on God’s green earth is fast New York?” she demanded, squinting at the post office cancellation mark across the stamp.
“I’ve done my homework. The people in the photograph are Amish. Belfast, New York is the rough center of the Amish community that lives upstate New York, and the only town upstate that ends in fast. It makes tradecraft sense. All the men have long beards. Instead of shaving off his beard, which is what the Russian revolutionaries used to do when they wanted to disappear, Samat would keep his and dress like the Amish and melt into the madding crowd.”
“Who’s he hiding from?”
“For starters, Chechen gangsters bent on revenge for the killing of one of their leaders known as the Ottoman. Then there’s your sister, also his uncle Akim, who claims Samat siphoned off a hundred and thirty million dollars from holding companies he controlled. For some reason I can’t figure out, the CIA seems to be very interested in him, too.”
“Where do I come in?”
“When you described Samat to me in the pool parlor—”
“That seems so long ago it must have been during a previous incarnation.”
“You’re talking to a world-class expert on previous incarnations. When you described him, you said his eyes were seaweed-green and utterly devoid of emotion. You told me if you could see his eyes, you would be able to pick him out of a crowd.” Martin lowered his voice. “I don’t mean to push you past where you’re ready to go—how come you know his eyes so well?”
Stella turned away. After a moment she said, “You wouldn’t ask the question if you didn’t imagine the answer.”
“You saw his seaweed-green eyes up close when you slept with him.”
Stella groaned. “The night of the wedding, he came to my room in the early hours of the morning. He slipped under the covers. He was naked. He warned me not to make a commotion—he said it would only hurt my sister when he told her I’d … I’d invited him.” Stella looked into Martin’s eyes. “I’d know his eyes anywhere because I memorized them when he fucked me in the room next to my sister’s bedroom on the night of her marriage to this monster of a man. I was originally planning to stay in Kiryat Arba for three weeks, but I left after ten days. He came into my bed every night I was there …”
“And when you returned two years later?”
“I took him aside the first day and told him I’d kill him if he came into my bed again.”
“How did he react?”
“He only laughed. At night he would turn the doorknob to torture me, but he didn’t come into the room. Martin, you’ve got to tell me the truth—does this change anything between us?”
He shook his head no.
Stella permitted the ghost of a smile to settle softly onto her lips again.
1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS THE GET
DRIVING IN THE VINTAGE PACKARD HE HAD BORROWED FROM HIS friend and landlord, Tsou Xing, the owner of the Mandarin restaurant below the pool parlor on Albany Avenue, Martin and Stella reached Belfast after dark. The pimply boy working the pump at the gas station on the edge of town ticked off on grimy fingers the choices available to them: a bunch of descent hotels in town, some pricier than others; an assortment of motels along Route 19 either side of town, some seedier than others; several bed and breakfasts, best one by a country mile was old Mrs. Sayles place on a groundswell overseeing the Genesee, the advantage being the riot of river water which lulled some folks to sleep, the disadvantage being the riot of river water which kept some folks up until all hours.
They found their way to the house on the river with “B & B” and “Lelia Sayles” etched on a shingle hanging from a branch of an ancient oak, and reached through the tear in the screen to work the knocker on the front door. As they didn’t have luggage, Martin was obliged to cough up $30 in advance for a room with a matrimonial bed, bathroom down the hall, kindly go barefoot if you use the facilities during the night so as not to wake the ghosts sleeping in the attic. They went out to get a bite to eat at a diner across from the public library on South Main and lingered over the decaf, both of them trying to put off the moment when there would be no turning back. Parking on the gravel in Mrs. Sayles’s driveway afterward, Martin decided the Packard’s engine oil level needed checking. “I’m every bit as agitated as you,” Stella murmured, reading his mind as he propped up the hood. She started toward the house, then wheeled back when she reached the porch, her left palm drifting up to the triangle of pale skin visible on her chest. “Look at it this way, Martin,” she called. “If the sex doesn’t work out to everyone’s expectations, we can always fall back on the erotic phone relationship.”
“I want sex and the erotic phone relationship,” he replied.
Stella angled her head to one side. “Well, then,” she said, laughter replacing the nervousness in her eyes, “maybe you ought to stop monkeying with the damn motor. I mean, it’s not as if either of us were virgins.”
“How’d it go?” Mrs. Sayles asked the next morning as she set out dishes of homemade confitures on the kitchen table.
Martin, irritated, demanded, “How’d what go?”
“It,” Mrs. Sayles insisted. “Heavens to Betsy, the carnal knowledge part. I may be pushing eighty from the far side, but I’m sure as hell not brain dead.”
“It went very nicely, thank you,” Stella said evenly.
“Loosen up, young fellow,” Mrs. Sayles advised when she noticed Martin buttering a piece of toast for the second time. “You’ll be a better bed partner for it.”
Hoping to change the subject, Martin produced the picture postcard.
“My great-great-great-grandfather, name of Dave Sanford, built the first sawmill on the banks of the Genesee River,” Mrs. Sayles explained, all the while rummaging through a knitted tote bag for her reading glasses. “That was long about 1809. This house was built in 1829 with lumber from that mill. Belfast was a one-horse town in those days. Nothing but forests far as the eye could see, so they say, so they say. When the lumber boom wore out the forests, most folks turned to raising cattle. The White Creek Cheese Factory, which is famous ‘round here, was founded long about 1872 by my great-grandfather—”