Free Legends by Robert Littell Page A

Agency’s Higher Economic School. When he graduated near the top of his class, he was drafted into the KGB. Because of his computer skills, he was posted to the Sixth Chief Directorate.”
    “You knew him personally?”
    “He was assigned to several cases I worked on. He became an expert on money laundering techniques he knew everything there was to know about offshore banks and bearer-share business operations. In 1991, when Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev and took power, one of the things he did was break up our Committee for State Security into its component parts, at which point a great many KGB officers found themselves suddenly unemployed and scrambling to make a living. Samat was one of them.”
    “You were in America by then. How do you know all this?”
    “Your Central Intelligence Agency encouraged me to keep in touch with the Sixth Directorate. They wanted me to recruit agents in place.”
    “Did you succeed?”
    Kastner flashed a pained smile. Martin said, “I take back the question. So we’re up to where Samat, with the KGB closing down its shop, starts looking at the help wanted ads. What kind of job did he land?”
    “He ended up working for one of the rising stars in the private sector, someone who had his own model of how to make the transition from socialism to market-oriented capitalism. His solution was gangster capitalism. He was one of the gangsters the Sixth Chief Directorate kept track of when I was there. Samat, with his knowledge of money laundering techniques, quickly worked his way up to become the organization’s financial wizard. He was the one who brought the shell game to Russia. You have seen the Negroes playing the shell game on street corners down on Rogers Avenue. They fold your ten-dollar bill until it is the size of a walnut and put it under a sea shell and move it around with two other shells. When they stop your ten-dollar bill has disappeared. Samat did the same thing but on a much larger scale.”
    “And this is the Russian Lubavitch who wanted to marry your daughter and live in Israel?”
    Kastner nodded heavily. “At one point the CIA asked me to try and recruit Samat. They arranged for me to talk with him on the telephone when he was in Geneva. I spoke of a secret account that could be his if he came over. I named a sum of money that would be deposited in this account. He laughed and replied that the sum of money they were suggesting was the loose change in his pocket. He told me the CIA could not afford to pay him a tenth of what he was earning. When Samat returned to Russia he made sure everyone knew the CIA had attempted to recruit him. There was even a satiric article published in Pravda describing the clumsy approach by a defector.”
    “When did Samat get in touch with you about marrying your daughter?” Martin asked.
    “It was not Samat who contacted Kastner,” Stella said. “Samat’s employer, who happened to be Samat’s uncle his father’s brother is the one who got in touch with Kastner.”
    Martin looked from one to the other. “And who was Samat’s employer?”
    Kastner cleared his throat. “It was Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the one known as the Oligarkh.”
    ” The Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov who was on the cover of Time magazine in the early nineties?”
    “There is only one Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,” Kastner remarked with some bitterness.
    “You knew that Samat was working for Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov when you agreed to the marriage?”
    Kastner looked at his daughter, then dropped his eyes. It was obviously a sore subject between them. Stella answered for her father. “It was not an accident that Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov contacted Kastner the two of them were acquainted from the days when the Sixth Chief Directorate was keeping track of the new cooperatives.”
    “In the early nineteen-eighties,” Kastner explained, “Ugor-Zhilov was a small-time hoodlum in a small pond he ran a used-car dealership in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He had a KGB record: He’d been