Legends

by Robert Littell

  A rasp of a whisper came from Djamillah’s cracked lips; she spoke slowly, struggling to pronounce certain consonants with her mouth open. “I told the ones … ones who questioned me … the Irishman was a client.”

  “Who, then, made the notations on the photographs?” demanded the imam.

  “The notations … were on the photographs when they … they were delivered to me.”

  Dr. al-Karim nodded once. The gunman behind Djamillah slipped two fingers through the hoop of the remaining earring and pulled down hard on it. It severed the skin on the lobe and came free in a spurt of blood. Djamillah opened her mouth to scream, but passed out before the sound could emerge from her throat.

  A pitcher of water was flung in her face. Her eyes twitched open and the muted scream lodged at the back of her throat like a fish bone exploded with savage force. Dante winced and turned away. Dr. al-Karim came around the desk and planted himself in front of Dante. “Who are you?” he demanded in a low growl.

  “Pippen, Dante. Free-lance, free-minded, free-spirited explosive expert of Irish origin, at your beck and call as long as you keep depositing checks in my off-shore account.”

  The imam circled the prisoner, looking at her but talking to Dante. “I would like to believe you are who you say, for your sake; for mine, as well.”

  “Come on, now—she must have seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in the room over the bar. Any one of them could have been her contact.”

  “Were you intimate with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she have any distinguishing marks on her body?”

  Dante described the small scar on the inside of her thigh, the trimmed pubic hair, the vaccination scar on her left arm, or was it her right—he wasn’t sure. Ah, yes, there was also the faded tattoo of a night moth under her right breast. Dr. al-Karim turned to the prisoner and, gripping the loose fitting shirt at the buttons, ripped it away from her body. He gazed at the faded tattoo under her breast, then flung the shirt closed, tucking the loose fabric under the strips of white masking tape.

  “How much did you pay her?” the imam asked.

  Dante thought a moment. “Fifty dollars.”

  “What denomination bills?”

  “Two twenties and a ten.”

  “You handed her two twenties and a ten?”

  Dante shook his head. “I put the bills on the desk. I weighed them down with a shell casing.”

  “What was she wearing when you had sex with her?”

  “Her shoes.”

  “What were you wearing?”

  “A condom.”

  Dr. al-Karim watched Dane closely. “She, too, said you were wearing a condom—on your circumcised penis. I assume you can explain how an Irish Catholic from Castletownbere came to be circumcised?”

  Dante rolled his eyes in frustration. “Of course I can explain it. In a moment of intense stupidity, I let myself be talked into it by my first American girlfriend, who more or less made it a condition of sleeping with me. She’d somehow convinced herself she stood less chance of my passing on a venereal disease if I had my foreskin lopped off.”

  “What was the girl’s name?”

  “For Christ’s sake, you don’t really expect me to come up with the name of every girl I slept with.”

  “Where was the operation performed?”

  “Ah, that I remember. On the fourth floor of an ether-reeking clinic.” Dante supplied the clinic’s name and address.

  The imam returned to the chair behind the desk. “Consider yourself under house arrest,” he informed Dante. “Clearly you are an expert in explosives. But I fear you may be working for someone other than Hezbollah. We will reexamine your curriculum vitae with a fine-toothed comb. We will send someone to Castletownbere on the Beara Peninsula, we will start with Mary McCullagh and the restaurant called The Bank and follow the trail from there. We will check to see if the New York clinic has a record of your circumcision. If you have lied about a single detail …” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

  As Dante rose to his feet a deep groan escaped from the prisoner. Everyone in the room turned to look at her. Her mouth agape, Djamillah hyperventilated and angled her head and, gasping for breath, fixed her one open eye on Dante. With some effort she managed to spit out, “You are … one lousy lover, Irish.” And then she smiled a crooked smile and gagged on the mordant laughter seeping from the back of her throat.

  Back in his low room, with armed guards posted at the door, Dante sprawled on his cot and stared at the white washed ceiling, wondering if the stains of the crushed flies might convey bulletins from the front. And he re-created her voice in his skull; he could make out the words, forced with great effort through her bruised lips. You are one lousy lover, Irish.

  At sunset Abdullah turned up at the door of his room. His manner had changed; it was written in his eyes that he no longer thought of Dante as a comrade in arms. “You are instructed to come with me,” he announced, and without waiting he turned and quit the room. Two gunmen with their kaffiyahs masking their faces and only their eyes visible fell in behind Dante as he followed Abdullah through the village to the Hezbollah camp’s perimeter fence. The gate in the fence had been dragged back and Abdullah signaled for Dante to follow him through it to the rim of the quarry. The nineteen apprentice bombers, along with the permanent staff and the Hezbollah gunmen who had brought the prisoner from Beirut were lined up along the rim. Across the quarry, her back to the setting sun, Djamillah was being bound to a stake by two of the gunmen. One of them hung a small khaki army satchel around her neck, then reached inside it to manipulate the wires and complete the electrical circuit. Djamillah’s knees buckled under her and she collapsed into the ropes holding her to the stake. As the gunmen left her side, the satchel dangling from its straps against her chest, Dr. al-Karim materialized alongside Dante. He was holding a small remote transmitter, which he offered to the Irishman. “Would you like the honor?”

  Dante looked down at the transmitter. “She is not my enemy,” he said.

  High above the Bekaa rift two Israeli jets, flying soundlessly, their contrails catching the last smudges of sunlight, appeared from the north. When they were directly over the Hezbollah camp they banked ninety degrees to the west. As they headed toward the sea the sound of their engines engulfed the camp.

  The imam gazed across the quarry at the woman tied to the stake. Then, in an abrupt gesture, he raised the transmitter and rotated the switch until there was a hollow click and depressed it. For an instant that stretched into an eternity nothing happened. Dr. al-Karim, his brows knitted, was raising the transmitter to activate it again when, across the quarry, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it dissipated, the woman had vanished and only the stump of the stake remained. Around the rim of the quarry the fedayeen began to wander off into the darkness that settled quickly over the Bekaa at this time of year. The imam produced the string of jade worry beads and began working them through his pudgy fingers. The gesture struck Dante as therapeutic. He noticed that Dr. al-Karim’s fingers and lips were trembling. Could it be that this was the first time he’d killed someone with his own hand?

  “When one of our own turns her back on faith,” the imam murmured—he appeared to be talking to himself—“it is a mortal sin, punishable by execution.”

  By midnight the cold gusts that swept down from the Golan Heights most nights of the year had picked up, drowning out the sound of the helicopters coming in high and fast and plummeting toward the ground like shot birds to land at strategic points around the Hezbollah camp. The roadblock at the spot where the Beirut highway curved up hill to the village and the camp was overrun without a shot being fired. The fedayeen noticed that the men coming toward them were wearing kafiyyahs and made the fatal mistake of taking them for Arabs. “Assalamu aleikum,” one of the men in kafiyyahs called out; a sentry at the roadblock called back, “Wa aleikum salam.” It was the last word he uttered. In the bunker on top of the
hill above the quarry, the fedayeen started firing their heavy machine gun into the darkness when they caught sight of figures sprinting up the slope; the attackers, equipped with night vision goggles, didn’t return fire until they were close enough to lob stun grenades over the bunker’s sandbags. Other teams from the helicopters, their faces blackened with charcoal, raced through the village to attack the two low buildings that served as the camp’s dormitory. Most of the apprentice bombers, as well as the staffers and the visiting fedayeen, were gunned down as they tried to flee through the doors and the windows. Explosive charges planted against the small brick building blew away the Hezbollah flag on the roof and set off a string of smaller explosions as the wooden boxes filled with ammunition caught fire.

  Dante, crouching inside the door of his room, heard the two guards outside hollering into a walkie-talkie for instructions. When there was no response they both raced off in the direction of the imam’s house behind the mosque, only to be killed by one of the Israeli teams blocking the narrow streets. The first casualties for the raiders came when several of them burst through the back door into Dr. al-Karim’s office: One of the imam’s personal guards walked toward them with his hands raised over his head and then blew himself up, killing two of the attackers and wounding two more. The other raiders, streaming through doors and windows, stormed through the house, killing the bodyguards and servants and one of the imam’s wives and two of his teenage sons as they dashed from room to room. They found Dr. al-Karim hiding in an armoir on the top floor as his second wife and two other children cowered in a nearby bathroom fitted with gold-plated faucets on the sink and the bathtub. The imam was handcuffed and blindfolded and hauled through the streets toward one of the waiting helicopters.

  When the sound of gunfire subsided, Dante knotted Djamillah’s white silk bandanna around his neck and darted from the house in the direction of the water well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. Turning the corner of a narrow street, he was suddenly caught in a cross fire between some fedayeen who had taken cover on the ground floor of the school and the attackers crouching behind a low wall across the street. Dante dove behind a pickup truck as the fedayeen started firing rifle grenades. One of them exploded next to the pickup and Dante felt the tingling prick of hot shrapnel in his lower back. The sound of gunfire seemed to grow more distant as he lay on the road, staring up at the dull white stain stretching across the night sky while he waited for the pain that always trailed after the tearing of skin. Slightly delirious, he was trying to focus on the Milky Way in order to identify the star that represented the deified soul of the Alawite prostitute, Djamillah, when it finally arrived: a searing stitch of pain shot up his spinal column and he blacked out.

  Dante woke to the blinding whiteness of a hospital room. Sunlight streamed through two windows and he felt its warmth on his shoulders above the bandages. He turned his head away from the sunlight and discovered Crystal Quest sitting on the next bed, munching crushed ice as she worked on a crossword puzzle. Benny Sapir, the Mossad spymaster who had briefed him in Washington, watched from the foot of the bed.

  “Where the hell am I, Fred?” Dante asked weakly.

  “He’s come back to life,” Benny observed.

  “About time,” Quest growled; she didn’t want Dante to take her presence there as a manifestation of softness. “I have other things to do in life besides holding his hand. Hey, Dante, being Irish, you ought to know this one: Joyce’s ‘Silence, exile, and …’ Seven letters, starts with a ‘c.’”

  “Cunning. That was Stephen Dedalus’s strategy for survival in Portrait of an Artist.”

  “Cunning. Ha! It fits perfectly.” Fred peered over the top of the newspaper, her bloodshot eyes focusing on the wounded agent. “You’re in Haifa, Dante, in an Israeli hospital. The doctors had to pry some metal out of your lower back. The bad news is you’ll wind up with a disagreeable cavity and a gimpy left leg, the result of a compressed nerve. The good news is there will be no major infirmities, and you’ll be able to tuck a pistol behind your back without it producing a bulge in your clothing.”

  “Did you capture the imam?”

  “We collared the guy who was masquerading as an imam. A direct descendant of the Prophet my ass! I suppose it won’t hurt if you fill him in,” she told Benny.

  “Izzat Al-Karim was a pseudonym. Your imam’s real name was Aown Kikodze; he was the only son of an Afghan father and his third wife, a teenage Kazakh girl who won a local beauty contest in Alma-Ata. Kikodze studied dentistry in Alma-Ata and was working as a dentist’s assistant there in the early 1980s when he made hegira to Mecca, where he was discovered by Iranian talent scouts and recruited into Hezbollah. We first noticed him when he opened a mosque above a warehouse in southern Lebanon and began preaching some malarkey about the near enemy and the far enemy—nobody could make heads or tails out of what he was saying, but it came across like the Islamic version of what you Americans call fire and brimstone and he made a name for himself. Next thing you know he was sporting the black turban of a sayyid and running a Hezbollah training base. Even as we speak, my colleagues are trying to talk him into helping them with their inquiries into Hezbollah activities in the Bekaa.”

  “I suspect they’ll succeed,” Fred said. “The Israelis are at war, Dante, so they don’t have weak-kneed civil libertarians breathing down their necks the way we do. If he’s still compos mentis when they finish with him, we get to get sloppy seconds.”

  Dante turned on Benny. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when you briefed me in Washington?”

  “If you’d been caught, you’d have talked. We didn’t want the putative imam to know we knew he was putative.”

  “Yeah, well, we lost Djamillah,” Dante said bitterly.

  Crystal Quest slid off the bed and approached Dante. “The Levant is full of girls named Djamillah. Which one are you talking about?”

  “The Djamillah in Beirut, for God’s sake, the Alawite who was posing as a prostitute. They executed her six hours before the helicopters arrived. I’ll lay odds you don’t want to hear how.”

  Fred snorted. “Oh, that Djamillah! Jesus, Dante, for someone in your line of work you can be awfully naive. ‘Djamillah’ was a legend. Her real name was Zineb. She wasn’t posing as a prostitute; she was working as a prostitute in Dubai when she was recruited. And she wasn’t an Alawite, she was an Iraqi Sunni. Thanks to some fancy footwork on our part, she believed she would be working for Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat. There was an elegant logic to this false flag pitch, if I do say so myself: Saddam detests the Shiites and their Iranian mentors, and by extension, he loathes Hezbollah, which is a Shiite client of the Iranian mullahs.”

  Dante could hear Djamillah’s voice in his ear. You are one lousy lover, Irish. “Whoever she was, she tried to save me when she could have used what she knew to save herself.” He noticed the square of white silk hanging from a hook on the back of the door. “Do me a favor, bring me the bandanna, Fred.”

  Crystal Quest retrieved the square of silk and folded it into Dante’s hand. “It’s a hell of a memento,” Benny said from the end of the bed. “You owe your life to that bandanna. When you didn’t turn up at the well, our raiding party decided to write you off. One of the teams taking a last look around the camp reported seeing a man lying next to a pickup wearing a white bandanna. It saved your life.”

  “My Dante Pippen cover must be blown.”

  “That’s the least of our problems,” Fred said with a titter. “One thing we have an endless supply of in Langley is legends. We’ll work up a brand new one for you when you’re back on your feet.”

  Benny said, “Thanks to you, Dante, the operation was a great success.”

  “It was a crying shame,” Dante said with sudden vehemence, and he meant it literally.

  1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT SHAMUS IS A YIDDISH WORD

  LULLED BY THE DRONE OF THE JET ENGINES, MARTIN—HIS RIGHT leg jutting into the aisle, his left knee jammed into the back of
the seat in front of him—had dozed off halfway through the flight and had missed the sight of the coastal shoal of Israel unrolling like a fulgent carpet under the wing of the plane. The wheels grinding out of their bays woke him with a start. He glanced at Stella, who was sound asleep in the seat next him.

  He touched her shoulder. “We’re almost there.”

  She nodded gloomily; the closer she got to Israel, the less sure she was about tracking down her sister’s runaway husband. What if she caught up with him? What then?

  As a matter of simple tradecraft, they had come to Israel using different routes: She had taken a flight to London and gone by train to Paris and then flown on to Athens to catch the 2 A.M. flight to Tel Aviv: He had flown New York-Rome and spent several hours getting lost in crowds around the Colosseum before boarding a train to Venice and an overnight car ferry to Patras, where he caught a bus to Athens airport and then the plane to Israel. Martin, queuing behind Stella, had winked at the woman behind the counter and asked for a seat next to the good looking girl who had just checked in.

  “Do you know her?” the woman had asked.

  “No, but I’d like to,” he’d replied.

  The woman had laughed. “You guys never give up, do you?”

  Landing at Ben-Gurion Airport in a light drizzle, the plane taxied to the holding area and the captain, speaking in English over the intercom, ordered the passengers to remain seated for security reasons. Two lean young men, their shirttails hanging loose to hide the handguns tucked into their belts, strolled down the aisle, checking identity photos in passports against faces. One of the young men, wearing opaque sunglasses, reached Martin’s row.

  “Passports,” he snapped.

  Stella produced hers from the side pocket of the hand bag under the seat. Martin pulled his from the breast pocket inside his vest and handed both of them to the security agent. He riffled through the pages with his thumb. Returning to the page with Martin’s photograph, he looked over the top of the passport at Martin. “Are you traveling together?”