Legends (18 page)

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?” Iwo.

“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 example 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?”

Instead of answering, Benny sniffed at the air, which was growing chillier as the car climbed into the hills. Martin kicked himself for having asked. He grasped what professional interrogators took for granted: Each time you posed a question, you revealed what you didn’t know. If you weren’t careful, the person being interrogated could wind up knowing more about you than you did about him.

Benny delicately changed the subject. “Does your leg give you trouble these days?”

“I got used to the pain.”

A grimace appeared on Benny’s prize-fighter’s lips that looked as if they had been in one fight too many. “Yes, pain is like the buzzing in an ear it’s something you learn to live with.”

As Benny shifted into second and turned onto a narrow road that climbed steeply, the small talk gave way to a comfortable silence that exists between two veteran warriors who have nothing to prove to each other. Benny had the car radio on and tuned to a classical music station. Suddenly the program was interrupted and Benny reached to turn up the volume. The announcer delivered a bulletin of news. When the music came back on, Benny lowered the volume.

“There was another pigu’a,” he informed Martin. “That’s a terrorist attack. Hezbollah in the Lebanon ambushed an army patrol in the security corridor we occupy along the border. Two of our boys were killed, two wounded.” He shook his head in disgust. “Hezbollah makes the mistake of thinking that we’re all hanging out in Tel Aviv nightclubs or raking in millions in our Israeli Silicon Valley, that prosperity has drained the fight out of us, that we’ve grown soft and fat and are not willing to die for our country. One of these days we’ll have to set them straight…”

The outburst took Martin by surprise. Not knowing how to respond, he said, “Uh-huh.”

Twenty-five minutes after picking Martin up near the shouk, Benny drove into what looked like a rich man’s housing project filled with expensive two-story homes set back from the street. “We’re a kilometer inside the West Bank here,” he noted as he eased the Skoda to the curb in front of a house with a wraparound porch. Martin followed him through the metal gate and along the porch to the back of the house, where Benny pointed out the low clouds in the distance drenched with saffron light. “It’s Jerusalem, over the horizon, that’s illuminating the clouds,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“No,” Martin shot back; the word escaped his lips before he knew what he was going to say. When Benny looked quickly at him, Martin added, “It makes me uneasy.”

Benny asked, “What makes you uneasy cities beyond the horizon? Clouds saturated with light? My living on the Palestinian side of the sixty-seven border?”

Martin said, “All of the above.”

Benny shrugged. “I built this house in 1986, when Har Addar was founded,” he said. “None of us who came to live here imagined we would ever give this land back to the Palestinians.”

“Living on the wrong side of the green line must be something of an embarrassment for you.”

Benny punched a code into a tiny number pad fixed on the wall to turn off the alarm. “If and when we agree to the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said, “we’ll have to adjust the frontier to take into account Israeli communities like this one.” He unlocked the door and let himself into the house. The lights came on the instant he crossed the threshold. “Modern gadgets,” he explained with a snigger. “The alarm, the automated lights are Mossad perks they supply them to all their senior people.”

Benny set out a bottle of imported whiskey and two thick kitchen glasses on a low glass table, along with a plastic bowl filled with ice cubes and another with pretzels. They both scraped over chairs and helped themselves to a stiff drink. Martin produced a Beedie from a tin box. Benny provided a light.

“To you and yours,” Martin said, exhaling smoke, reaching to clink glasses with the Israeli.

“To legends,” Benny shot back. “To the day when they become war surplus.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Martin declared.

Martin glanced around, taking in the framed Hockney prints over die sofa, the brass menorah on the sideboard, the three blown-up photographs, each bordered in black, of young men in army uniforms on the wall over the chimney. Benny noticed him noticing. “The two on the left were childhood friends. They were both killed in action on the Golan, one in sixty-seven, the other in seventy-three. The one on the right is our son, Daniel. He was killed in an ambush in the Lebanon a year and a half ago. Roadside bomb hidden in a dead dog blew up as his jeep went past. His mother… my wife died of grief five months later.”

Now Martin understood the source of the pain that Benny had learned to live with, and why he had grown melancholy. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.

“Me, also, I’m sorry,” was all Benny could trust himself to answer.

They both concentrated on their drinks. Finally Benny broke the silence. “So what brings you to the Holy Land, Dante?”

“You were the Mossad’s Russian expert, Benny. Who the hell is Samat Ugor-Zhilov?”

“Why are you interested in him?”

“He ran off from Kiryat Arba without giving a divorce to his wife. She’s religious. Without a divorce she can’t remarry. Her sister, who lives in Brooklyn, hired me to find Samat and get him to give her the divorce.”

“To know who Samat is, you have to understand where he was coming from.” Benny treated himself to another shot of whiskey. “How much do you know about the disintegration of the Soviet Union?”

“I know what I read in the newspapers.”

“That’s a beginning. The USSR we knew and loathed imploded in 1991. In the years that followed the country became what I call a klep-tocracy. Its political and economic institutions were infiltrated by organized crime. To get a handle on what happened, you need to understand that it was Russia’s criminals, as opposed to its politicians, who dismantled the communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union. And make no mistake about it, the Russian criminals were Neanderthals. In the early stages of the disintegration, when almost everything was up for grabs, the Italian mafia came sniffing around to see if they could get a piece of the action. You will have a better handle on the Russian mafia when you know that the Italians took one look around and went home; the Russians were simply too ruthless for them.”