Legends

by Robert Littell

  In the beginning, the young men were afraid to touch the explosive charges until they saw Dante juggling a clump of it from one hand to the other to demonstrate how stable it was. Abdullah, meanwhile, took Dante’s hand-written list to Dr. al-Karim and then set off for Beirut in the Ford with a purse-full of the imam’s precious American dollars to purchase the battery-operated transmitters and receivers that would go into the construction of remote detonators.

  The first afternoon that Dante turned up in Dr. al-Karim’s study, he found the imam seated well back from a table, leaning over his abundant stomach and typing away with two fingers on an IBM electric typewriter. From behind the building came the low hum of the gasoline-powered generator. “Assalamu aleikum—Peace be upon you. I would offer you a cigarette if you smoked cigarettes,” the imam said, swiveling to face his visitor, waving him toward a wooden kitchen chair. “Can I assume you do not mind if I light up?”

  “Be my guest.”

  The imam appeared to be puzzled. “How is it possible for me to be your guest in my house?”

  “It was a meaningless figure of speech,” Dante conceded.

  “I have observed that Americans often come up with meaningless cliches when they do not know what to say.”

  “I won’t make the same mistake twice.”

  The woman who brought Dante breakfast appeared from the next room and set out plates filled with small honey-coated cakes and two glasses filled with mint leaves and boiling water. Nibbling on one of cakes as he waited for the mint tea to cool, Dante took in the Spartan furnishings of the imam’s study: framed photographs of the training camp’s fedayeen graduating classes (slightly askew, as if someone had dusted them and left them askew to show they’d been cleaned), a poster depicting the golden-domed Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem tacked to one wall, the Kalashnikov in a corner with a clip in it and a spare clip taped to the stock, the glass bowl on a low table with a single goldfish circling round and round as if it were looking for the exit, the copies of Newsweek stacked on the floor near the door. Dr. al-Karim scraped his chair around the table and, settling his bulk onto it facing his guest, warmed both his hands on the glass of mint tea.

  Speaking softly, selecting his words carefully, the imam said: “There was a time when people held me in high esteem.”

  “Judging from what I’ve seen, they still do.”

  “How long, Mr. Pippen, will this last? How long do you think one can go on preaching that the destruction of your principal enemy is inevitable without it transpiring; without losing the credibility that is indispensable to continue as the spiritual leader of a community? This is the predicament I find myself in. I must continue to hold out hope that our sacrifices will be rewarded not only with martyrdom but with certain victory over the Isra’ili occupiers of Lebanon and Palestine, and the Jews who are conspiring to take over the world. But in time even the simplest of the fedayeen, sent to combat the enemy, observes through binoculars that the Isra’ilis still occupy their sandbagged fortresses in the south of Lebanon, that the wakes of their patrol boats still crisscross the waters off our coast, that the contrails of their jet aircraft still stain the sky over our heads.”

  “Do you believe victory is inevitable?” Dante asked.

  “I am convinced that the Jews will one day be seen, like the Christian Crusaders before them, as a footnote in the long flow of Arab history. This is written. Will it happen in my lifetime? Will it happen in the lifetime of my children?” Dr. al-Karim sipped at the tea, then, licking his lips to savor the taste of the mint, he leaned forward. “I can buy time, Mr. Pippen, if your talents provide me with some incremental measure of success. Our Hezbollah fighters, armed with conventional weapons, are unable to inflict casualties on the better armed Isra’ili soldiers occupying the zone in southern Lebanon. We attack them with mortars or artillery, fired from the heart of some Lebanese village so that the Isra’ilis are unable to riposte. Very occasionally, we manage to wound or kill one or two of them. For every one we kill, we lose twenty or thirty fedayeen when our enemies, with remarkably accurate intelligence, descend from their fortresses to raid our bases here in the Bekaa Valley, or closer to the front lines. They always seem to know where we are, and in what strength.” The imam shook his head. “We are like waves lapping against boulders on a shore—I cannot recruit and train and send into combat fighters by telling them that the boulders will, in a century or two, be washed smooth and reduced in size.”

  “I suppose that’s why you retained my services,” Dante said.

  “Is it true that you can mold your explosives to fit almost any receptacle?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And detonate them from a great distance by radio command, as opposed to electrical wires stretched along the ground?”

  Dante nodded emphatically. “Hard wire on the ground is more reliable, but radio-detonated explosions are more creative.”

  “Precisely how do radio-detonated explosions work?”

  “You need a transmitter—a cordless phone, a wireless intercom, a radio paging system—and a receiver, both tuned to the same frequency. The transmitter sends not just a signal but also an audio tone—known as electronic pulses—which are modulated by the transmitter and demodulated by the receiver. The receiver picks up the transmission, demodulates the audio tone, closes the electric circuit, which sends current to the blasting cap which, in turn, detonates the explosive charge.”

  “With your expertise, could we disguise the explosives in what appears to be ordinary roadside rocks and explode them from, say, a hilltop a kilometer away as an Isra’ili patrol passes?”

  “Child’s play,” Dante declared.

  The imam slapped his knee in elation. “God willing, we will bloody the Isra’ilis, Mr. Pippen. God willing, the waves lapping against the shore will demolish the boulders in my lifetime. And when we have finished with the near enemy, we will turn our attention to the distant enemy.”

  “The Israelis are obviously the near enemy,” Dante said. “But who is the distant enemy?”

  Dr. al-Karim looked Dante in the eye. “Why, you, Mr. Pippen, are the distant enemy. You and your American civilization which considers smoking dangerous for the health while everything else—extramarital sex, pornography, carnal secularism, materialism—is permissible. The Isra’ilis are an outpost of your corrupt civilization. The Jews are your surrogates, dispatched to steal our land and colonize our countries and demoralize our souls and humiliate our religion. When we have defeated them we will turn our attention to the ultimate enemy.”

  “I can see how you might attack what you call the near enemy,” Dante replied. “But how will you war against a distant enemy who can obliterate you the way he would a mosquito caught in flagrante delicto on the back of his wrist?”

  The imam sat back in his chair, a knowing smile flickering on his pudgy face. “We will use the vast amounts of money we earn from selling you petrol for your gas-guzzling cars to hire the talents of people like you, Mr. Pippen. American heads are already poisoned by Hollywood films and glossy magazines such as Playboy or Hustler. We will poison their bodies. We will hijack their planes and crash them into their buildings. We will construct, with your help, the poor man’s bomb—valises filled with germs or chemicals—and explode it in their cities.”

  Dante reached for the glass of mint tea and touched his lips to it. “I’d best be immigrating back to Ireland, then,” he said lightly.

  “I can see that you do not take what I say seriously. No matter.” The imam pushed back his sleeve, glanced at his wristwatch and rose to his feet. “You will sleep fitfully tonight as you turn over in your mind what I have told you. Questions will occur to you. I invite you to come back tomorrow and pose them, Mr. Pippen. God willing, we will pick up the conversation where we left it off.”

  Dante stood up. “Yes. I will return. Thank you.”

  In the days that followed, Dante used what Abdullah had brought from Beirut to show his students how to assemble remot
e control detonators and set off explosive charges in the quarry from the top of the nearby hill. When Dr. al-Karim’s people supplied the first molded rock made out of plaster of paris, Dante filled it with PETN and rigged a remote detonator. The students set the molded rock down at the side of the road and tethered a lame goat ten meters from it. Then everyone trooped up the hill. The imam himself, hearing of the experiment, showed up at the lip of the quarry to watch. Dante waved to him and Dr. al-Karim, surrounded by four bodyguards, raised a palm in salute. One of the young fedayeen wired the small transmitter to a car battery. Everyone turned to stare at the goat at the bottom of the quarry. “Okay, Abdullah,” Dante said. “Let her rip.” Reaching for the small radio, Abdullah rotated the switch until there was an audible click and then depressed it. Far below, in the quarry, a dry cough of a blast stirred up a swell of dust. When it cleared, the goat had vanished. Where it had stood, the ground was saturated with blood and entrails.

  “God is great,” Abdullah murmured.

  “PETN is greater,” Dante remarked.

  When Dante entered the imam’s study that afternoon, Dr. al-Karim came bounding around the desk to congratulate him. “You have earned your wages, Mr. Pippen,” he said, throwing a pulpy arm over Dante’s shoulder. “My fighters are eager to use your remote control device against the Jews.”

  The two settled onto kitchen chairs. Dr. al-Karim produced his jade beads and began threading them through his fingers with great dexterity as Dante explained that he needed another ten days, no more, no less, to make the imam’s fedayeen ready for combat.

  “We have waited this long,” the imam said. “Another ten days will not inconvenience us.”

  The conversation drifted on to the two-year-old Syrian occupation of parts of Lebanon; the month before Dante’s arrival, Damascus had installed surface-to-air missiles in the Bekaa, a move that Hezbollah did not appreciate since it was bound to attract Isra’ili attention to the valley. Dr. al-Karim wanted to know whether President Bush would put pressure on the Isra’ilis to pull back from the buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Dante said he was far from being an expert in such matters, but he doubted it. He, in turn, wondered whether the Iranians would put pressure on the Syrians to end their virtual occupation of Lebanon now that the civil war had quieted down. The imam replied that the death the week before of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had created a vacuum in the Islamic world and predicted that it would be a long time before the Shiites found someone with enough charisma to take his place. Dante asked jokingly if the imam aspired to the job. Dr. al-Karim took the question seriously. He stopped manipulating his worry beads and placed a finger along the side of a nostril. “I aspire to serve God and lead my people to victory over the Jews,” he said. “Nothing more.”

  “Tell me something, Dr. al-Karim—” Dante hesitated.

  The imam’s head bobbed. “Only ask, Mr. Pippen.”

  “I notice that you often speak of the Jews, not the Israelis. I’m curious to know if Hezbollah isn’t confusing the two. What I’m getting at is this: Are you anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish?”

  “In as much as Isra’il is an enemy state,” the imam replied without hesitation, “we are, of course, anti-Isra’ili.” He started manipulating his worry beads again. “But make no mistake, we are also anti-Jewish. Our common history goes back to the Prophet Muhammad. The Jews never recognized the legitimacy of Islam as the true religion, and the Koran as the word of God.”

  “Your critics say this attitude more or less puts you in the same boat as Adolf Hitler.”

  The imam shook his head vigorously. “Not at all, Mr. Pippen. Our critics miss an essential point. Hitler was anti-Semite. There are enormous differences between being anti-Jewish and anti-Semite.”

  “I’m afraid you’re losing me …”

  “Anti-Semites, Mr. Pippen, believe that once a Jew, always a Jew. For Hitler, even a Jew who converted to Christianity remained a Jew. It follows that for the Nazis in particular and for anti-Semites in general, there was no solution except what they called the Final Solution, namely the extermination of the Jews. Being anti-Jewish, on the other hand, implies that there is a solution short of extermination; a way for Jews to save themselves from extermination.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “The Jew can convert to Islam, at which point Islam will have no quarrel with him.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you see, Mr. Pippen?”

  “I see that I shouldn’t have started this conversation in the first place. I am a hired gun. You pay me for services rendered, not my opinions on your opinions.”

  “Quite right, quite right. Though if my answers don’t interest you, I will admit to you that your questions interest me.”

  Abdullah materialized outside the window, tapping a fingernail against a pane. When the imam went over to the window, Abdullah pointed to the car winding its way up the dirt road toward the Hezbollah camp.

  “I had almost forgotten,” Dr. al-Karim said, turning back to Dante. “I am expecting a visitor. The Syrian commander in the Bekaa stops by every once in awhile to see what we are up to. He will stay through prayers and the evening meal tomorrow. It might be wise if you keep out of sight, as I have not informed him of your presence and the Syrians do not take kindly to foreigners in the valley.”

  “How about if I disappear in the direction of Beirut,” Dante asked. “It’s been almost three weeks since I arrived. As tomorrow is Friday and my students will be in the mosque praying, I was going to ask you for a day off.”

  “And what will you do on this day off of yours?”

  “In my entire life I have never gone this long without a swill of beer. I will take my warm body off to a bar and drink a barrel of it.”

  “Why not? Beirut has quieted down. And you have earned a day of rest. I will send Abdullah and one of my bodyguards to keep you out of harm’s way.”

  “An Irishman does not go to a licensed tabernacle to keep out of harm’s way, Dr. al-Karim.”

  “Nevertheless, out of harm’s way is where we must keep you until you have completed your work here. What you do after that is your affair.”

  The following afternoon the battered Ford that had transported Dante to the Bekaa three weeks earlier threaded its way through a tangle of secondary roads in the direction of Beirut. The bodyguard, sporting baggy khakis and cradling a Kalashnikov with notches cut into the stock for each of his kills, sat up front bantering in Arabic with the driver, a coal-black Saudi with matted dreadlocks. Dante, wearing a coarse brown Bedouin burnoose, a black-and-white checkered kaffiyah and dark sunglasses, shared the backseat with Abdullah, who climbed out of the car at each Syrian checkpoint to wave, with an imperious snap of the wrist, the letter bearing Dr. al-Karim’s seal and signature in the face of the soldiers who were (so Abdullah swore) completely illiterate. Dante, lost in thought, stared through his reflection in the window, barely noticing the dusty villages with the swarms of barefoot boys playing soccer in the unpaved streets, the crowded open-air souks with giant dish antennas for sale on one side and donkeys and camels tethered to a nearby fence, the tiled butcher shops with young boys fanning the flies off the carcasses hanging from hooks. At the outskirts of Beirut, the Ford passed through the first of the militia barricades but (as Abdullah explained in halting English) the pimply gunmen there, though literate, were more interested in the twenty-dollar bills folded into Dr. al-Karim’s letter than the letter itself or the passengers in the car.

  With the presence of the Syrian army, the warring factions that had slaughtered each other in the streets of Beirut since the mid 1970s had more or less gone to ground; Muslim and Christian emissaries were rumored to be meeting at Taif, in Saudi Arabia, to formalize the cease-fire accord but armed militias still patrolled the city, which sprawled like a mutilated virago at the edge of the Mediterranean, its shell-ridden buildings mute testimony to the brutal fifteen-year civil war. As the sun dipped into the sea and darkness enveloped Beirut, the whett
ed crack of distant gunfire reverberated through the city; Abdullah, visibly edgy, muttered something about old scores being settled before the formal cease-fire came into effect. Careful not to stray from the Muslim-controlled areas of Beirut, he guided the driver to the port area and deposited Dante on a corner opposite the burnt-out shell of a neighborhood mosque. A narrow street angled off down-hill toward the docks. “We will wait for you here,” Abdullah told Dante. “Please to be returned by the hour of ten so we can be returned to the camp by the midnight.”

  On the narrow street, broken neon lights sizzled over a handful of bars that catered to the seamen from the ships docked at the quays or tied to giant buoys in the harbor. Waving cheerfully at his keepers, Dante skipped down the sidewalk and, ducking to get under a broken neon tube dangling from its electric cord, shouldered past the thick rug that served as a door into the first bar, set up in a mercantile building that had been gutted by a direct hit from a mortar. The charred rafters that held up the jury-rigged sloping roof had been whitewashed, but they still stank from the fire. Dante found a place at the makeshift bar between two Turkish sailors holding each other up and a Portuguese purser wearing a rumpled blue uniform.

  “So now, what will your pleasure be?” the barman called, a distinct Irish lilt to his gruff voice.

  Dante punched a hole in the cigarette smoke that obscured his view and spoke through it. “Beer and lots of it,” he called back, “the warmer the better.”

  The bartender, a thick man with a shock of tousled rusty hair spilling over his eyes and a priest’s white shirt buttoned up to his neck, plucked a large bottle of Bulgarian beer from a carton at his feet. He flicked off the metal cap with a church key, stopped the throat of the bottle with the ball of his thumb and shook the beer to put some life into it, then set it on the counter in front of Dante. “And will your lordship be wanting a mug to drink from?” he inquired with a laugh.