Martin held the pistol unwaveringly for several long seconds, then slowly let the front sight drop. “Your other uncle, the one who lives in Caesarea, claims you stole a hundred and thirty million dollars from six of his holding companies. He offered me a million dollars to find you.”
Samat glimpsed salvation. “I will pay you two million not to find me.”
“I don’t accept checks.”
Samat saw that he might be able to worm his way out of this predicament after all. “I have bearer shares hidden in the freezer of the icebox.”
“There is one other matter that needs to be arranged,” Martin informed him.
Confidence began seeping back into Samat’s voice. “Only name it,” he said, all business.
Stella spent the better part of the next morning on Samat’s phone trying to track down an Orthodox rabbi who would accommodate them. An old rabbi in Philadelphia gave her the number of a colleague in Tenafly, New Jersey; a recorded announcement at the Chabad Lubavitch Synagogue there suggested anyone calling with a weekend emergency try the rabbi’s home number, which rang and rang without anyone answering. A rabbi at Beth Hakneses Hachodosh in Rochester knew of a rabbi at Ezrath Israel in Ellenville, New York, who delivered religious divorces, but when Stella dialed the number she fell on a teenage daughter; her father, the rabbi, was away in Israel, she said. He did have a cousin who officiated at B’nai Jacob in Middletown, Pennsylvania. If this was an emergency, Stella could try phoning him. It was the Middletown rabbi who suggested she call Abraham Shulman, the rabbi at the Beth Israel Synagogue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Rabbi Shulman, an affable man with a booming voice, explained to Stella that what she needed was an ad hoc rabbinical board, composed of three Orthodox rabbis, to deliver the scroll of the get and witness the signatures. As luck would have it, he was sitting down to Sunday brunch with two of his colleagues, one from Manhattan, the other from the Bronx, both of them, like Shulman, Orthodox rabbis. Oh, dear, yes, it was unusual but the rabbinical board could witness the signing of the get by the husband even if the wife were not physically present and then forward the document to the wife’s rabbi in Israel for her signature, at which point the divorce would become final. Rabbi Shulman inquired how long it would take her and the putative husband to reach Crown Heights. Stella told the rabbi they could be there by late afternoon. She jotted down his directions: cross over from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the Manhattan Bridge, follow Flatbush Avenue down to Eastern Parkway, then follow Eastern Parkway until you reached Kingston Avenue. The synagogue filled the top three floors of number 745 Eastern Parkway on your left coming from New York, immediately after Kingston Avenue.
The three rabbis, looking somewhat the worse for brunch, were holding court in Shulman’s murky book-lined study on the ground floor under the synagogue. Shulman, the youngest of the three, was clean shaven with apple-shiny cheeks; the two other rabbis had straggly white beards. All three wore black suits and black fedoras propped high on their foreheads; on the two older rabbis it looked perfectly natural, on Shulman it produced a comic effect. “Which of you,” boomed Shulman, looking from Samat to Martin and back to Samat, “is the lucky future ex?”
Martin, one hand gripping the Tula-Tokarev in his jacket pocket, prodded Samat in the spine. “Who would believe,” Samat said under his breath as he shuffled across the thick carpet, “you went to all this trouble to find me for a divorce.”
“Did you say something?” inquired the rabbi to the right of Shulman.
“It is me, the divorcer,” Samat announced.
“What’s the mad rush to divorce?” the third rabbi asked. “Why couldn’t you wait until the shul opens on Monday morning?”
Stella improvised. “He’s booked on a flight to Moscow from Kennedy airport this evening.”
“There are Orthodox rabbis in Moscow,” Shulman noted.
In a bamboo cage set on a wooden stepladder next to floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a green bird with a hooked bill and bright red plumes between its eyes hopped onto a higher trapeze and declared, clear as a bell, “Loz im zayn, loz im zayn.”
Rabbi Shulman looked embarrassed. “My parrot speaks Yiddish,” he explained. “Los im zayn means let him be.” He smiled at his colleagues. “Maybe Ha Shem, blessed be his Name, is trying to tell us something.” The rabbi turned back to Samat. “I assume you wouldn’t come all this way without identification.”
Samat handed his Israeli passport to the rabbi.
“You are Israeli?” Shulman said, plainly surprised. “You speak Hebrew?”
“I immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union. I speak Russian.”
“The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore,” Shulman pointed out.
“I meant Russia, of course,” Samat said.
“Excuse me for asking,” the oldest of the three rabbis said, “but you are Jewish?”
“My mother is Jewish, which makes me Jewish. The Israeli immigration authorities accepted the proofs of this when they let me into the country.”
Stella explained the general situation while Shulman took notes. Her sister, whose Israeli name was Ya’ara, daughter of the late Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner of Brooklyn, New York, currently lived in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank called Kiryat Arba. Ya’ara and Samat Ugor-Zhilov, here present, had been married by the Kiryat Arba rabbi, whose name was Ben Zion; Stella herself had been a witness at the marriage ceremony. Samat had subsequently abandoned his wife without granting her a religious divorce. This same Samat, here present, had had second thoughts about the matter and is now willing to put his signature to the document granting a religious divorce to his wife. She stepped forward and handed the rabbis a scrap of paper which spelled out the terms of the divorce. Samat’s signature was scrawled across the bottom.
The resplendent parrot descended to the lower trapeze and cried out, “Nu, shoyn! Nu, shoyn!” Shulman said, “That’s the Yiddish equivalent of Let’s put the show on the road.”
One of the older rabbis looked across the room at Martin. “And who are you?”
“That’s a good question, rabbi,” Martin said.
“Perhaps you would like to answer it,” Shulman suggested.
“My name is Martin Odum.”
Looking straight at Martin, Stella said, “He has deeper layers of identity than a name, rabbi. Fact is, he’s not absolutely sure who he is. But so what—women fall for men all the time who don’t know who they are.”
Shulman cleared his throat. The three rabbis bent over Samat’s passport. “The photograph in the passport doesn’t look anything like this gentleman,” one of the rabbis observed.
“I did not have a beard when I came to Israel,” Samat explained.
Stella said, “Look carefully—you can tell by the eyes it’s the same man.”
“Only women are able to identify men by their eyes,” Shulman remarked. He addressed Samat. “You affirm that you are the Samat Ugor-Zhilov who is married to—” he glanced at his notes—“Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov of Kiryat Arba?”
“He does affirm it,” Stella said.
The rabbi favored her with a pained look. “He must speak for himself.”
“I do,” Samat said. He glanced at Martin, leaning against the wall near the door with one hand in his jacket pocket. “I affirm it.”
“Is there any issue from this marriage?”
When Samat looked confused, Stella translated. “He’s asking if you and Ya’ara had children.” She addressed Shulman directly. “The answer is: You can’t have children when you don’t consummate the marriage.”
One of the older rabbis chided her. “Lady, given that he is not contesting the divorce, I think you are telling us more than we need to know.”