Legends Page 10

  “Do you charge for it?” Dante asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, why would we want to do that? You’re paying such an outrageous price for the goddamned beer, we supply the mug at no extra cost to yourself.” He slid a freshly washed mug down the bar to Dante. “Now what ship did you say you were off?”

  “I didn’t say,” Dante shot back. “It’s the H.M.S. Pinafore.”

  The smile froze on the bartender’s face. “H.M.S. Pinafore, did you say?”

  Dante filled the mug, swiped away the foam with the back of a forefinger and, tilting back his head, drank off the beer in a long gulping swallow. “Ah, that surely transforms the way a man sees the world,” he announced, starting to fill the mug again. “H.M.S. Pinafore. That’s what I said.”

  Accepting this with a brisk nod, the bartender made his way to the far end of the bar and, blocking one ear with the tip of a finger, spoke into a telephone. Dante was halfway through his second bottle of Bulgarian beer when the woman appeared at the top of the broken wooden steps that led to what was left of the offices on the upper floor of the mercantile building. A sailor buttoning his fly trailed behind her. The woman, wisps of long dark hair falling across a face disfigured by smallpox scars, was wearing a tight skirt slit high on one thigh and a gauzy blouse through which her breasts were as visible as they would be if she’d been caught walking naked through a morning haze. All conversation ceased as she came across the room, her high heels drumming on the wooden floorboards. She stopped to take her bearings, spotted Dante and installed herself at the bar next to him.

  “Will you buy me a whiskey?” she demanded in a throaty murmur.

  “I’d be a horse’s ass not to,” Dante replied cheerfully, and he held up a finger to get the bartender’s eye and pointed to the woman. “Whiskey for my future friend.”

  “Chivas Regal,” the woman instructed the bartender. “A double.”

  Dante authorized the double with a nod when the bartender looked at him for confirmation, then turned to scrutinize the woman the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. As usual he had difficulty figuring out her age. She was Arab, that much was evident despite the thick eyeliner and the splash of bright red on her lips, and probably in her forties, but exactly where he didn’t know. It occurred to him that she must be Christian, since Muslims would kill their women before they’d let them work as prostitutes.

  “So what would be your name, darling?” Dante asked.

  She absently combed the fingers of one hand through her hair, brushing it away from her face; two large silver hoop earrings caught the light and shimmered. “I am Djamillah,” she announced. “What is your name?”

  Dante took a long swig of beer. “You can call me Irish.”

  “From the look of you, you have been at sea for a while.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “You’re dying of thirst, I can see that from the way you gulped down that disgusting Bulgarian beer. What else are you dying of, Irish?”

  Dante glanced at the bartender, rinsing glasses in a sink just out of earshot. “Well, now, Djamillah, to tell you the God awful truth, I haven’t been laid in a month of Sundays. Is that a predicament you could remedy?”

  The Portuguese purser, sitting with his back to Dante, could be heard snickering under his breath. Djamillah was unfazed. “You are a direct man,” she said. “The answer to your question, Irish, is: I could.”

  “How much would it set me back?”

  “Fifty dollars U.S. or the equivalent in a European currency. I don’t deal in local money.”

  “Bottoms up,” Dante said. He clicked glasses with her and downed what was left in the mug, grabbed the half-empty bottle of beer by the throat (in case he needed a weapon) and followed her across the room to the stairs. At the top of the stairs she pushed open a wooden door and led Dante into what must have once been the head office of the mercantile company. There was a large desk covered in glass with photographs of children flattened under it near the boarded-over oval windows, and an enormous leather couch under a torn painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Acre. A dozen sealed cartons without markings were stacked against one wall. Locking the door behind them, Djamillah settled onto the couch and, reaching through a torn seam into the cushion, produced a folder filled with eight-by-ten aerial photographs. Dante, settling down alongside her, used his handkerchief to grip the photographs and examined them one by one. “These must have been taken from high altitude,” he remarked. “The resolution is excellent. They’ll do nicely.”

  The woman offered Dante a felt-tipped pen and he began to draw arrows to various buildings in the camp and label them. “The recruits, nineteen fedayeen in all, live in these two low buildings inside the perimeter fence,” he said. “Explosives and fuses are stored in this small brick building with the Hezbollah flag on the roof. Dr. al-Karim lives and works in the house behind the mosque. It is easily the largest in the village so your people won’t have a problem identifying it. I don’t know where he sleeps but his office looks out at the mosque so it must be—” he drew another arrow and labelled it “K’s office”—“here. I bunk in with a family in this house in the village.”

  “What kind of security do they have at night?”

  “I’ve strolled around the camp after dark several times—they have a roadblock, manned by two recruits and one of the instructors, stationed here where the road curves uphill to the village and the camp. There’s a bunker with a heavy machine gun on top of the hill over the quarry which is manned during the day. I’ve never been able to get up there at night because the gate in the perimeter fence is locked and I didn’t want to raise suspicions by asking for the key.”

  “We must assume it is manned at night. They’d be fools not to. The machine gun must be a priority target. What kind of communications do they have?”

  “Don’t know really. Never saw the radio shack, or a radio for that matter. Spotted what looked like high frequency antennas on the top of the minaret of the mosque, so whatever they have must be somewhere around there.”

  “We don’t want to bomb a mosque, so we’ll have to take that out by hand. Does Dr. al-Karim have a satellite phone?”

  “Never saw one but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.”

  “When will this round of training be finished.”

  “I’ve told Dr. al-Karim I needed ten more days.”

  “What happens then?”

  “The graduating class goes off to the front to kill Israeli soldiers occupying the buffer zone in Lebanon. And a freshman class turns up to start a new cycle of training.”

  “How many instructors and staff are in the camp?”

  “Including transportation people, including the experts on small arms and martial arts, including Dr. al-Karim’s personal bodyguards, four that I’ve seen, I’d say roughly eighteen to twenty.”

  Djamillah went over the photographs again, double checking the distances between buildings, the location of the gate in the perimeter fence, identifying the footpaths that crisscrossed the village and the Hezbollah camp. She produced a military map of the Bekaa to see what other forces Hezbollah might have in the general vicinity of the camp. “When the raid begins, you must somehow get to this spot”—she pointed to a well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. She handed Dante a white silk bandanna and he stuffed it into the pocket of his trousers. “Wear this around your neck so you can be easily identified.”

  “How will I know when to expect the raid?”

  “Exactly six hours before, two Israeli M-16s will fly by at an altitude high enough to leave contrails. They’ll come from north to south. When they are directly above the camp they will make ninety degree turns to the west.”

  Djamillah slipped the photographs and the map back into the folder and wedged it into the seam of the cushion.

  “Looks as if we’ve more or less covered the essentials,” Dante remarked.


  “Not quite.” She stood up and began matter of factly stripping off her clothing; it was the first time in his life Dante had seen a woman undress when the act didn’t seem sensual. “You are supposed to be up here having sex with me. I think it would be prudent for you to be able to describe my clothing and my body.” She removed the blouse and the skirt and her underpants. “I have a small scar on the inside of my thigh, here. My pubic hair is trimmed for a bikini. I have a faded tattoo of a night moth under my right breast. And on my left arm you will see the scars of a smallpox vaccination that didn’t prevent me from getting smallpox, which accounts for the pockmarks on my face. When we came up here I locked the door and you put fifty dollars—two twenties and a ten—on the desk and weighed them down with the shell casing that’s on the floor over there. We both took off our clothing. You asked me to suck you—that was the expression you used—but I said I don’t do that. You stripped and sat down on the couch and I gave you a hand job and when you were erect I slipped on a condom and came on top of you. Please make note of the fact that I make love with my shoes on.” She began to dress again. “Now it’s your turn to strip, Irish, so that I can describe your body if I need to. Why do you hesitate? You are a professional. This is a matter of tradecraft.”

  Dante shrugged and stood up and lowered his trousers. “As you can see, I am circumcised. My first American girlfriend talked me into having it done—she seemed to think there was less chance of her catching some venereal disease from me if I were circumcised.”

  “Circumcised and well endowed, as they say. Do you have any scars?”

  “Physical or mental?”

  She didn’t think he was humorous. “I do not psychoanalyze my clients, I only fuck them.”

  “No scars,” he said dryly.

  She inspected his body from foot to head, and his clothing, then gestured for him to turn around. “You can put your clothes back on,” she finally said. She walked him to the door. “You are in a dangerous business, Irish.”

  “I am addicted to fear,” he murmured. “I require a daily fix.”

  “I do not believe you. If you did not believe in something you would not be here.” She offered her hand. “I admire your courage.”

  He gripped her hand and held it for a moment. “And I am dazzled by yours. An Arab who risks—”

  She tugged her hand free. “I am not an Arab,” she said fiercely. “I am a Lebanese Alawite.”

  “And what the hell is an Alawite?”

  “We’re a sliver of a people lost in a sea of Arab Muslims who consider us heretics and detest us. We had a state once—it was under the French Mandate when the Ottoman Empire broke up after the First World War. The Alawite state was called Latakia; my grandfather was a minister in the government. In 1937, against our will, Latakia became part of Syria. My grandfather was assassinated for opposing this. These days most of the Lebanese Alawites side with the Christians against the Muslims in the civil war. Our goal is to crush the Muslims—and this includes Hezbollah—in the hope of returning Lebanon to Christian rule. Our dream is to reestablish an Alawite state, a new Latakia on the Levantine shore washed by the Mediterranean.”

  “I wish you good luck,” Dante said with elaborate formality. “What is it that Alawites believe that Muslims don’t?”

  “Now is not the moment for such discussions—”

  “You are a professional. This is a matter of tradecraft. I might be asked what we talked about after we had sex.”

  Djamillah almost smiled. “It is our belief that the Milky Way is made up of the deified souls of Alawites who rose to heaven.”

  “For the rest of my life I shall think of you when I look at the Milky Way,” he announced.

  She unlocked the door and stepped aside. “In another incarnation,” she remarked solemnly, “it would have been agreeable to make love with you.”

  “Maybe when all this is over—”

  This time Djamillah did smile. “All this,” she said bitterly, “will never be over.”

  Two days after his return from Beirut, Dante was squatting in the dirt at the bottom of the quarry, demonstrating to his nineteen apprentice bombers how to fill the body cavity of a dead dog with PETN, when there was a commotion at the gate of the perimeter fence above them. Several of Dr. al-Karim’s personal guards were tugging aside the razor wire. Horns blaring, two cars and a pick-up truck roared into the camp and pulled up in a swirl of dust. As the dust settled, gunmen wearing the distinctive checkered Hezbollah kaffiyah could be seen dragging someone wearing loose fitting striped pajamas and a hood over the head from the second car. Women from the village emerged from their homes and began filling the air with ululations of triumph. Lifting the hem of his burnoose, Abdullah trotted up the path until he was within earshot of the gunmen who had stayed behind to guard the vehicles and called out to them. One shouted an answer to his question and fired a clip from his Kalashnikov into the air. Abdullah turned back toward the quarry and, cupping his hands around his mouth, yelled, “God is great. They have captured an Isra’ili spy.”

  The apprentice bombers started talking excitedly among themselves. Dante, suddenly edgy, barked at them to pay attention to the demonstration. The students reacted to the tone of his voice even before Abdullah, scampering back down to the group, translated the words. Dante, wearing a surgical glove on his right hand, finished pulling the intestines through the slit he’d made in the dog’s stomach and began stuffing the packets of PETN wrapped in burlap, and then the radio-controlled detonator, into the cavity. Using a thick needle and a length of butcher’s cord, he sewed up the slit with large stitches. Standing, peeling off the surgical glove, he addressed Abdullah. “Tell them to position the dead dog so that its stomach is facing away from the enemy when he approaches.” One of the students raised his hand. Abdullah translated the question. “He says you, is a dead dog more suitable than the papier-mâché rocks we learned to plant at the side of the road?”

  “Tell him the Greeks couldn’t have used the Trojan horse trick twice,” Dante said. “Tell him the same goes for the Israelis. They’ll catch on very quickly to the fake rocks stuffed with explosives. So you need to invent other ruses. A dead dog lying in the middle of a road is so common that the Israeli jeeps will keep going. At which point—”

  Dr. al-Karim appeared above them on the rim of the quarry. He raised a bullhorn and called, “Mr. Pippen, I would like a word with you, if you please.”

  Dante saluted lazily and started to climb the path. Halfway to the top he looked up and noticed that several of the Hezbollah gunmen had joined the imam. All of them had pulled their checkered kaffiyahs over their faces so that only their eyes were visible. Out of breath, Dante reached the top and approached Dr. al-Karim. Two of the gunmen slammed bullets into the chambers of their Kalashnikovs. The metallic sound caused Dante to stop in his tracks. He forced a light laugh through his lips. “Your warriors seem jittery today,” he remarked. “What’s going on?”

  Without answering, Dr. al-Karim turned and stalked off toward his house. Two of the gunmen prodded Dante with the barrels of their rifles. He bristled. “You want me to follow him, all you have to do is ask. Politely.”

  He trailed after the imam to the large house next to the mosque. When he reached the back of the house he found the door to Dr. al-Karim’s office ajar. One of the gunmen behind him gestured with his Kalashnikov. Shrugging, Dante kicked open the door with his toe and went in.

  Time seemed to have stopped inside the room. Dr. al-Karim, his corpulent body frozen in the seat behind the desk, his eyes hardly blinking, stared at the Israeli spy, bound with strips of white masking tape to a straight-backed kitchen chair set in the middle of the floor. Muffled groans came from the prisoner’s mouth under the black hood. Dante noticed the thinness of the prisoner’s wrists and ankles and jumped to the conclusion that Hezbollah had arrested a teenage boy. The imam motioned for Dante to sit in the other straight-backed chair. Four of the gunmen took up positions along the wal
l behind him.

  “Where did we leave off our last conversation?” Dr. al-Karim inquired stiffly.

  “We were talking about the Greeks and Aristotle. You were condemning them for teaching that reason gives access to truth, as opposed to faith.”

  “Precisely. We know what we know because of our faith in Allah and His Prophet, who guide us to the right way, the only way. It may be seen as a transgression when a lapsed Catholic like you does not accept this; normally a believer such as myself should attempt to convert you or, failing at that, expel you.” He glanced at the spy. “When one of our own turns his—or her—back on faith, it is a mortal sin, punishable by execution.”

  The imam muttered an order in Arabic. One of the gunmen came up behind the Israeli spy and tugged off the hood. Dante caught his breath. Patches of Djamillah’s long dark hair were pasted to her scalp with dried blood. One of her eyes was swollen shut, her lips were badly cut, several front teeth were missing. A large hoop earring dangled from one lobe; the skin on the other lobe hung loose, the result of having had the earring wrenched off without first undoing it.

  “You do not deny that you know her?” Dr. al-Karim said.

  Dante had trouble speaking. “I know her in the carnal sense of the word,” he finally replied, his voice barely audible. “Her name is Djamillah. She is the prostitute who worked the licensed tabernacle I visited in Beirut. She carted me off upstairs to what the Irish call the intensive care unit.”

  “Djamillah is a pseudonym. She claims she cannot remember her real name but she is obviously lying; she is protecting members of her family against retribution. She was passing herself off as a prostitute in order to spy for the Jews. Aerial photographs of several training camps, ours included, were discovered hidden in the room she used. Some of the photographs had notations, in English, describing the camp layout. We suspect you may have provided her with these notations when you visited the bar in Beirut.”