Legends полностью

“I swear to you on my mother’s head, I do not know where the Oligarkh is. The 718 number was the home phone of the American manufacturer of artificial limbs that I imported to London for distribution to war zones.” Tears welled in Samat’s seaweed-green eyes. “For all I know, the Oligarkh may no longer be alive. In the Witness Protection Program, these things are tightly compartmented, precisely so that no one can get to him through me. Or to me through him.”

Stella said, very quietly, “He may be telling the truth.”

Samat clutched at the buoy Stella had thrown him. “I never meant to harm you,” he told her. “The marriage to your sister was a matter of convenience for both of us—she wanted to live in Israel and I had to get out of Russia quickly. I was incapable of sleeping with Ya’ara. You have to comprehend. A man can only be a man with a woman.”

“Which narrowed it down to Stella,” Martin said.

Samat avoided his eye. “A normal man has normal appetites …”

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.