Legends Read online

  “Do you have any idea where he went?”

  “The one time I asked him he told me it was not the business of a wife to keep track of a husband.”

  Stella looked brightly at Martin. “We went with him once, Martin.” She smiled at her half sister. “Don’t you remember, Elena—”

  “My name is Ya’ara now,” Stella’s sister reminded her coldly.

  Stella was not put off. “It was when I came for the wedding,” she said excitedly. “I had to be at Ben-Gurion Airport at seven in the evening for my flight back to New York. Samat was going somewhere for lunch. He said if we didn’t mind killing time, he had to see someone on the coast and could drop me at the airport on the way back to Kiryat Arba.”

  “I remember that,” Ya’ara said. “We made bologna sandwiches and packed them in a paper bag and took a plastic bottle of apple juice.” She sighed again. “That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she added.

  Stella said to Martin, “He drove north from Tel Aviv along the expressway and got off at the exit marked ‘Caesarea.’ There was a labyrinth of streets but he never hesitated, he seemed to know his way around very well. He dropped us on the edge of the sand dunes near some A-frame houses. We could see those giant chimneys down the coast that produced electricity.”

  Ya’ara’s face lit up for the first time in Martin’s presence; the smile almost made her look handsome. “I wore an enormous straw hat to protect my face from the sun,” she recalled. “We ate in the shade of a eucalyptus tree and then hunted for Roman coins in the sand.”

  “And what did Samat do while you were scouring the dunes for Roman coins?” Martin asked.

  The girls looked at each other. “He never told us. He picked us up at the A-frames at five-thirty and dropped me off at the airport at six-forty.”

  “Uh-huh,” Martin said, his brows knitting as he began to fit the first blurred pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place.

  Martin took a tiny address book (tradecraft ruled: Everyone in it was identified by nickname and phone numbers were masked in a simple cipher) from his pocket and used his AT&T card to call Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant (listed in the address book as “Glutamate”) under the pool parlor on Albany Avenue in Crown Heights. Given the time difference, Tsou would be presiding from the high stool behind the cash register, glowering at the waitress who had replaced Minh if she failed to push the more expensive dishes on the menu. “Peking duck hanging in window for two days,” he’d once informed Minh, his gold teeth glistening with saliva, his face a mask of earnestness (so she had gleefully recounted to Martin), “is aphlodisiac, good for elections.”

  “Xing’s Mandalin,” a high pitched voice—so distinct it could have been coming from the next room—announced when the phone on the other end was picked up. “Filled up at lunch, same tonight. No flea table until lunch Sunday.”

  “Don’t hang up,” Martin cried into the phone. “Tsou, it’s me, Martin.”

  “Yin shi, from where you calling, huh?”

  Martin knew that Fred would be keeping track of his whereabouts through Asher and the Israeli Shabak, so he figured he was not giving anything away if he told the truth.

  “I’m in Israel.”

  “Islael the Jewish kingdom or Islael the Jewish delicatessen on Kingston Avenue?” Tsou didn’t wait for an answer. “You know about Minh, huh?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. Tell me what happened, Tsou.”

  The story spurted out. “She goes up to check the hives the way you asked. She does not come back. Clients begin to fidget. No food in sight. I go out back and shout up ‘Minh.’ She does not shout back. I climb file escape, find Minh laying on back, not moving, not conscious, clazy bees stinging life out of Minh’s face. Disgusting. Makes me want to vomit. Call police on loft phone, Matin, hope you do not mind, let them into loft when they ling bell, they put on face masks and chase bees with can of Laid found below sink, they take Minh away in ambulance, face bloated big like basketball. She dead before ambulance leach hospital, Matin. Minh’s death makes page two Daily News, big headline say ‘Deadly Bees Kill Clown Heights Woman.’“

  “What did the police say, Tsou?”

  “Two detectives come for lunch next day, sons of bitches leave without paying check, I wave it in faces but they do not take hint. They ask about you and I tell them what I know, which is nothing. They tell me ASPCA in white clothing came to kill bees. They tell me hive exploded, which is what made bees clazy to attack Minh. Comes as news to me honey can explode.”

  Through the window Martin could see the orange streaks of sunset in the sky and the rabbi assembling a group of settlers for the stroll down the road toward Hebron and the Cave of Machpela. “It comes as news to me, too,” he said very softly.

  “What you say?” Tsou shouted.

  “I said, honey doesn’t normally explode.”

  “Huh. So. Detectives, they say Minh not even Minh’s name, she illegal immigrant from Taiwan named Chun-chiao. Business picked up when Daily News ran name Xing’s Mandolin on page two even though they spelled Xing ‘Zing.’ I admit it, whole thing leave bad taste in my mouth. Velly upsetting.”

  Martin assumed Tsou was referring to Minh’s death. “Yeah, very,” he agreed.

  Tsou, however, seemed to be more concerned with Minh’s false identity than her death. “Cannot believe anyone anymore these days, huh, yin shi? Minh not Minh. Maybe you not Matin.”

  “Maybe the Daily News was right,” Martin said, “maybe your real name is Tsou Zing with a ‘Z.’“

  “Maybe,” Tsou agreed with a sour laugh. “Who can say?”

  With Rabbi Ben Zion and Martin strolling along in the lead and the two Kastner sisters bringing up the rear, the group of thirty or so ultranationalist orthodox settlers, the men sporting tzitzit and embroidered yarmulkes, the women in ankle-length skirts and long sleeved blouses and head scarves, made their way down the road toward the Cave of Machpela to greet the Sabbath at the holy site where the Patriarch Abraham was said to be buried. Two policemen wearing blue uniforms and blue baseball caps, along with half a dozen of the younger settlers, walked on either side of the group, rifles or Uzis slung over their shoulders.

  The sun had disappeared behind the hills and the darkness was starting to blot out the twilight between the buildings. Instinctively, the murky dusk left Martin feeling queasy. Agents who worked the field liked daylight because they could see danger coming, and night-time because they could hide from it; the penumbra between the two offered none of the advantages of either. The massive fortress-like structure built over the sacred cave loomed ahead like a ship adrift in a fog.

  “What do the Palestinians here think of your pilgrimages to the shrine?” Martin asked the rabbi, all the while inspecting the spaces between the Palestinian houses off to the right for any telltale sign of activity. Martin tensed as a shard of light ricocheted off a roof; as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he realized it was nothing more than a lingering sliver of sunlight glinting off the solar heating panels atop a three-story building.

  “The Palestinians,” the rabbi replied, waving toward the surrounding houses, “say we’re walking on their toes.”

  “You are, aren’t you?”

  The rabbi shrugged. “Look, it’s not as if we’re being unreasonable. Those of us who believe the Lord God gave this land to Abraham and his descendants for eternity are willing to let the Palestinians remain here as long as they accept that the land is ours.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They can emigrate.”

  “That doesn’t leave them—or you, for that matter—much room for maneuver.”

  “It’s easy for visitors to come here from the outside and criticize, Mr. Odum, and then fly back to the safety of their country, their city, their homes …”

  “My home,” Martin ventured, “turns out to be less safe than I thought.” He made a mental note to get more details of the death of Stella’s father. He wondered if there had been an autops
y.

  “You’re talking about crime in the streets. It’s nothing compared to what we have to put up with here.”

  “I was talking about exploding honey—”

  “Come again—I must be missing something.”

  “Private joke.”

  Eyeing potential danger areas, Martin spotted a spark in an alley-way between two Palestinian homes to his right and uphill from the group of settlers walking toward the cave. Suddenly flames erupted and a blazing tire, thick black smoke billowing from it, started rolling downhill toward them. As the settlers scattered to get out of its path, the short hollow cough of a high-powered rifle resounded through the neighborhood and a spurt of dust materialized in the road immediately ahead of Martin. His old reflexes kicked in—he figured out what was going on in an instant. The tire was the diversion; the rifle shot had come from the other side of the road, probably from the top of the cement cistern a hundred and fifty yards away on a small rise. The two policemen and the settlers armed with weapons had reacted instinctively and were charging uphill in the direction of the alleyway where the tire had come from. One of the policemen was shouting into a walkie-talkie. Back at Kiryat Arba, a siren, its pitch rising as it whimpered into life, began shrieking across the countryside.

  “The shot came from behind us,” Martin shouted and he lunged for cover behind a low stone wall as the second shot nicked the dirt a yard beyond the spot where he’d been standing. Crouching behind the wall, massaging the muscles in his bad leg, Martin could see Stella and her sister, with her skirt hiked, running back up the hill toward the settlement, which was ablaze with searchlights sweeping the area. Moments later two Israeli jeeps and an open truck filled with soldiers came roaring down the road from the nearby army base. Leaping from their vehicles, the soldiers, bent low and running, charged the slopes on either side of the road. From behind the cistern came the staccato sound of automatic rifles being fired in short bursts. Martin suspected that the Palestinian rifleman—assuming he was Palestinian—had melted away and the soldiers were shooting at shadows.

  Dusting the dirt off of his sabbath suit, the rabbi came up to Martin. “You okay?” he asked breathlessly.

  Martin nodded.

  “That was too close for comfort,” Ben Zion said, his chest heaving with excitement. “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were shooting at you, Mr. Odum.”

  “Now why would they want to do that?” Martin asked innocently. “I’m not even Jewish. I’m just a visitor who will soon go back to the safety of his country, his city, his home.”

  1997: MARTIN ODUM MEETS A BORN-AGAIN OPPORTUNIST

  BENNY SAPIR LISTENED INTENTLY TO MARTIN’S ACCOUNT OF THE incident in Hebron. When he finally broke his silence it was to pose questions only a professional would think to ask.

  “How can you be sure it wasn’t some Arab kids letting off steam? That kind of thing happens all the time around Kiryat Arba.”

  “Because of the diversion. The attack was synchronized. The tire came first. Everyone looked off to the right. The two cops and the armed settlers raced uphill to the right. That’s when the first shot was fired. It came from the left.”

  “How many shots were there?”

  “Two.”

  “And both of them hit the road near you?”

  “The shooter’s rifle must have been pulling to the left. The first shot hit a yard or so ahead of me, which means he was firing short and left. The shooter must have cranked in a correction to the rear sight and elevated slightly. The second shot was on target—it hit beyond where I’d been standing, which means the bullet would have hit my chest if I hadn’t leaped for cover behind the low wall.”

  “Why didn’t he shoot again?”

  “Fact that he didn’t is what makes me think he was shooting at me. When I disappeared from view behind the low wall, there were still a dozen or so settlers crouching or lying flat on the ground. The search lights from Kiryat Arba were sweeping the area so he could easily see them. If he was shooting in order to kill Jews, he had plenty of targets available.”

  “Maybe the lights and the siren scared him off.”

  “Soldiers scared him off. But that happened five, maybe eight minutes later.”

  “Beseder, okay. So why would someone want to kill you, Dante?”

  “Retirement hasn’t dulled your edge, Benny. You’re asking the right questions in the right order. Once we figure out the ‘why,’ we move on to the ‘who.’”

  Returning to Jerusalem from Kiryat Arba (Stella had remained behind to be with her sister), Martin had braved the rank stench of a phone booth and had asked information for the phone number of a Benny Sapir. He was given five listings under that name. The second one, in a settlement community thirteen kilometers outside of Jerusalem, turned out to be the Benny Sapir who had briefed Dante Pippen in Washington before the mission to the Bekaa Valley eight years before; Benny, normally the Mossad’s point man on things Russian, had been covering for a colleague home on sick leave at the time. When he came on line now, Benny, who had retired from the Mossad the previous year, sounded winded. He recognized the voice on the other end of the phone immediately. “The older I get, the harder it is to remember faces and names, but voices I never forget,” he said. “Tell you the truth, Dante, never expected our paths to cross again.” Before Martin could say anything, Benny proposed to pick him up in front of the Rashamu Restaurant down from the Jewish shouk on Ha-Eshkol Street in half an hour.

  Exactly on time, a spanking new Skoda pulled up in front of the restaurant and the driver, a muscular man with the body of a wrestler, honked twice. Benny’s hair had gone gray and his once-famous smile had turned melancholy since Martin had last seen him, eight years before, standing at the foot of his hospital bed in Haifa. “Lot of water’s flowed under the bridge since we last saw each other, Dante,” Benny said as Martin slid onto the passenger seat. “You sure it wasn’t blood?” Martin shot back, and they both laughed at the absence of humor in the exchange. At the intersection ahead of them, two Israeli soldiers of Ethiopian origin were frisking an Arab boy carrying a tray filled with small porcelain cups of Turkish coffee. “So you are going by the name of Martin Odum these days,” Benny noted, wheeling the car into traffic and heading out of Jerusalem in the direction of Tel Aviv. The one-time spymaster glanced quickly at the American. “Sorry about that, Dante, but I was obliged to touch base with the Shabak.”

  “I would have done the same thing in your shoes.”

  It was obvious Benny felt bad about it. “Question of guarding one’s flanks,” he mumbled, apologizing a second time. “The people who run the show these days are a new breed—cross them and your pension checks start arriving late.”

  “I understand,” Martin said again.

  “Be careful what you tell me,” Benny warned. “They want me to file a contact report after I’ve seen you. They’re not quite sure what you’re doing here.”

  “Me, also, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here,” Martin admitted. “Where we going, Benny?”

  “Har Addar. I live there. I invite you for pot-luck supper. You can sleep over if you need a bed for the night. Does Martin Odum have a legend?”

  “He’s a private detective working out of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.”

  Benny rocked his head from side to side in appreciation. “Why not? A detective is as good a cover as any and better than most. I’ve used various legends in my time—my favorite, which was my cover when I was running agents in what used to be called the Soviet Union, was a defrocked English priest living in sin in Istanbul. The sin part was the fun part. To support my cover story, I had to practically memorize the Gospels. Never got over the trauma of reading John. If you’re looking for the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, you don’t have to go further than the Gospel According to John, which, by the way, wasn’t written by the disciple named John. Whoever wrote the text commandeered his name. Now that I think of it, you could make the case that this is an exam
ple of an early Christian legend.”

  Benny turned off the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and was wending his way up through the hills west of Jerusalem toward Har Addar when Martin asked him if the agents he’d run in the former USSR had been Jewish.

  Glancing quickly at his companion, Benny said, “Some were, most weren’t.”

  “What motivated them to work for Israel?”

  “Not all of them knew they were working for Israel. We used false flags when we thought it would get results. What motivated them? Money. Resentment for personal slights, real or imagined. Boredom.”

  “Not ideology?”

  “There must have been individuals who defected for ideological reasons but I personally never came across any. The thing they all had in common was they wanted to be treated as human beings, as opposed to cogs in a machine, and they were ready to risk their lives for the handler who understood this. The most remarkable thing about the Soviet Union was that nobody—nobody—believed in communism. Which meant that once you recruited a Russian, he made an outstanding spy for the simple reason that he’d been raised in a society where everyone, from the Politburo members on down to the Intourist guides, dissembled in order to survive. When a Russian agreed to spy for you, in a very real sense he’d already been trained to lead two lives.”

  “You mean three lives, don’t you? One where he outwardly conforms to the Soviet system. The second where he despises the system and cuts corners to get ahead within it. The third where he betrays the system and spies for you.”

  “Three lives it is.” Benny became pensive. “Which, when you think of it, may be par for the course. When you come right down to it, all men and some women live with an assortment of legends that blur at the edges where they overlap. Some of these IDs fade as we get older; others, curiously, become sharper and we spend more time in them. But that’s another story.”

  “Consider the possibility that it isn’t another story … Is Benny Sapir the last of your legends or the one your parents gave you?”