Legends

by Robert Littell

  They both said “No” at the same time.

  The young man pocketed the two passports. “Come with me,” he ordered. He stepped aside so that Martin could retrieve his valise from the overhead rack. Then he shepherded Stella and Martin down the aisle ahead of him. The other passengers gaped at the man and woman being hustled from the plane, trying to figure out whether they were celebrities or terrorists.

  An olive-green Suzuki with a thick plastic partition between the front and rear seats was waiting on the damp tarmac at the bottom of the portable stairs and Martin and Stella were motioned into the backseat. Martin could hear the locks in the back doors click shut as he settled down for what turned out to be a short ride. Stella started to say something but he cut her off with a twitch of his finger, indicating that the automobile could be bugged. Seeing her nervousness, he offered her a smile of encouragement.

  The first shadows of first light were starting to graze the tarmac and fields to the east of the airport as the car made its way to a distant hangar on the far side of the main runway and parked next to a metal staircase that led to a green door high in the hangar. The locks on the back doors of the Suzuki clicked open and the driver pointed with his chin toward the staircase.

  “I suppose they mean for us to go up there,” Stella ventured.

  “Uh-huh,” Martin agreed.

  Favoring his game leg, he led the way up the long flight of steps. At the top he tugged open the heavy gunmetal door and, holding it for Stella, followed her into an immense loft with a remarkably low ceiling. Sitting at desks scattered around the loft were twenty or so people working at computer terminals; despite the “Positively No Admittance” sign on the outside of the door, none of them looked up when the two visitors appeared. Female soldiers in khaki shirts and khaki miniskirts steered carts through the room, picking up and distributing computer disks. A man with a gray crew cut appeared from behind a heavy curtain that served to partition off a corner of the loft. He was dressed in a suit and tie (rare for an Israeli) and wore a government-issue smile on his very tanned face.

  “Look what the cat dragged in. If it isn’t Dante Pippin in the flesh.”

  “Didn’t know that Shabak mandarins got up before the sun,” Martin ventured.

  The smile vanished from the Israeli’s face. “Shabak mandarins never sleep, Dante. That’s something you used to know.” He glanced at Stella, who was peeling away the rubber bands on the braid dangling down her spine so that her hair, damp from the light rain, would dry without curling. “Step out of character,” the Shabak mandarin said to Martin, all the while taking in his companion’s thin figure in tailored trousers and running shoes, “be a gentleman and introduce us.”

  “His name used to be Asher,” Martin informed Stella. “Chances are he’s recycled himself by now. When our paths crossed he was a gumshoe for the Shabak, which is short for Sherut ha-Bitachon ha-K’lali. Is my pronunciation in the ball park, Asher? The Shabak is the nearest thing Israel has to an FBI.” Martin grinned at the Israeli. “I haven’t the foggiest idea who she is.”

  The Israeli spread his hands wide. “I didn’t come down with the first snowfall, Dante.”

  “If your people pulled her off the plane, it means you know who she is. Come clean, Asher. Who tipped you off?”

  “A little canary.” Asher pulled back a corner of the curtain and ushered his visitors into the area that served as an office. He gestured toward a couch and settled onto a high stool facing them.

  “Could that little canary of yours be a female of the species called Fred?” Martin inquired.

  “How can a female be named Fred?” Asher asked innocently.

  “Fred is Crystal Quest, the honcho of the CIA’s dirty tricks department.”

  “Is that her real name, Dante? We know the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations by another name.”

  Stella looked at Martin. “Why does he keep calling you Dante?”

  Asher answered for him. “When your traveling companion did us a favor eight years ago, Dante Pippen was his working legend. He disappeared from our radar screen before we had a chance to learn his real identity. So you can imagine our surprise when we discovered that Dante Pippen would be on the Olympus flight from Athens, traveling under the name of Martin Odum. Is Martin Odum the real you or just another one of your legends?”

  “Not sure, actually.”

  “People like you shouldn’t breeze into Israel without touching base with the Shabak. The way I see it, it’s a matter of professional courtesy. This is especially true when you’re traveling with a former member of the KGB.”

  Martin melted back into the couch, his eyes fixed on Stella. “The Israelis don’t get details like that wrong,” he said quietly. “Next thing you know, you’ll be telling me Stella isn’t your real name.”

  “I can explain,” she said.

  One of the girl soldiers wearing a particularly short khaki miniskirt backed past the curtain carrying a tray with a pot of hot tea and two mugs. She set it down on the table. Asher mumbled something to her in Hebrew. Glancing at the two visitors over her shoulder as she left, the girl snickered appreciatively.

  “If you can explain, explain,” Asher told Stella. He filled the two mugs and slid them across the table toward his visitors.

  Martin asked Stella, “What did you do for the KGB?”

  “I wasn’t a spy or anything like that,” she told him. “Kastner was the deputy head of the Sixth Chief Directorate before he defected. The directorate’s main line of work was dealing with economic crimes, but it wound up housing sections that didn’t have a home in any of the other directorates. The forgers, for instance, worked out of the Sixth Chief Directorate, and their budget was buried in the directorate’s overall budget. The same was true for the section that drew up blueprints for weapons the Soviet Union had no intention of developing, and then let the plans fall into the hands of the Americans in the hope of making them waste their resources keeping up with us. I was teaching English to grade-school children when Kastner proposed a job in a section that was so secret only a handful of Party people outside the Kremlin knew of its existence. Its in-house name was subsection Marx—but it was named after Groucho, not Karl. At any given time there were two dozen men sitting around a long table clipping stories from newspapers and magazines and inventing anti-Soviet jokes—”

  Disbelief was written all over Asher’s face. “I’ve heard some tall tales in my life but this beats them all.”

  “Let her finish.”

  Stella plunged on. “The KGB thought of the Soviet Union as a pressure cooker, and subsection Marx as the little metal cap that you occasionally lifted to let off steam. I and some other young women would come in on Fridays and memorize the jokes that the subsection had produced during the week. We were on an expense account—over the weekend we’d go out to restaurants or Komsomol clubs or workers’ canteens or poetry readings and repeat the jokes. They did a study once—they found that a good joke that started out in Moscow could reach the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific coast in thirty-six hours.”

  “Give us some examples of the jokes you spread,” Asher ordered, still dubious.

  Stella closed her eyes and thought for a moment. “When there were demonstrations in Poland against the stationing of Soviet troops there, I helped spread the story of the Polish boy who runs into a Warsaw police station and cries, ‘Quick, quick, you have to help me. Two Swiss soldiers stole my Russian watch.’ The policeman looks puzzled and says, ‘You mean two Russian soldiers stole your Swiss watch.” And the boy says, “That’s right but you said it, not me!’“

  When neither Martin nor Asher laughed, Stella said, “It was considered very humorous in its day.”

  “Do you remember another?” Martin asked.

  “One of our most successful jokes was the one about two Communist Party apparatchiks meeting on a Moscow street. One of them says to the other: ‘Have you heard the latest? Our Soviet scientists have managed to miniaturize nuclear
warheads. Now we no longer need those expensive intercontinental ballistic missiles to wipe out America. We can put the nuclear warhead into a valise and put the valise in a locker at Grand Central Station in New York City and if the Americans give us any trouble, pfffffft, New York will be reduced to radioactive ashes.’ The second Russian replies: ‘Nyevozmozhno. It’s not possible. Where in Russia will we find a valise?’”

  Stella’s joke reminded Martin of a fragment from a previous legend: Lincoln Dittmann’s conversation, at a terrorist training camp in Triple Border, with the Saudi who was interested in obtaining a Soviet nuclear valise-bomb. Somehow Stella’s little joke didn’t seem like a laughing matter. Asher obviously agreed because he was gnawing on the inside of a cheek in irritation.

  Stella, exasperated, repeated, “Where in Russia will you find a valise! That’s the punch line of a joke, for God’s sake. Is it against Israeli law to laugh?”

  “Asher, like his colleagues in the CIA and the KGB, lost laughter a long time ago,” Martin said. “They’re time servers, hanging on by their finger tips to a world they no longer understand. If they can hang on long enough, they’ll get a government pension and end their days growing stringless green beans in some suburban backyard. The reigning emotion here is nostalgia. On the rare occasions they loosen up, they start all their sentences with: Remember the time we … Isn’t that right, Asher?”

  Asher appeared to wince at Martin’s little speech. “Okay,” he said, turning to Stella, “for the moment let’s agree that you worked for subsection Marx spreading lousy anti-Soviet jokes so the country could let off steam. Whatever brings you and Dante to the Holy Land, it’s not to tell jokes.”

  “Tourism,” Martin said flatly.

  “Absolutely. Tourism,” Stella agreed emphatically. She reached for the mug of tea and dipped a pinky in it and carefully moistened her lips with the ball of her finger. “We came to see the Temple Mount, we came to see Masada on the Dead Sea, we came to see the Church of the Holy Sepulcher …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Are you planning to visit your sister in her West Bank settlement at some point?”

  Stella glanced at Martin, then turned back to Asher. “That also, naturally.”

  “And Dante is keeping you company in exactly what capacity?”

  Stella raised her chin. “I know him by the name of Martin. He is my lover.”

  The Israeli eyed Martin. “I suppose you could describe her body if you had to.”

  “No problem. Up to and including the faded tattoo of a Siberian night moth under her right breast.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Martin saw Stella start to undo the top buttons of her shirt; once again there was no sign of an undergarment, only a triangle of pale skin. Asher, embarrassed, cleared his throat. “That, eh, won’t be necessary, Miss Kastner. I have reason to believe Dante works as a private detective and you hired his services. What you do after working hours is your business.” Asher regarded Martin. “So that’s what spies turn into when they come in from the cold—they metamorphose into private detectives. Sure beats cultivating stringless green beans. Tell me something, Dante, how does one go about becoming a private detective?”

  “You watch old detective films.”

  “He’s a great fan of Humphrey Bogart,” Stella asserted, avoiding Martin’s eye.

  Asher watched her sip at the tea for a moment. When he spoke again his mood had changed; to Martin, he suddenly looked more like an undertaker than a cop. “Let me offer you some sympathy with your tea, Miss Kastner,” Asher began. He slid off the stool and walked over to a table and flipped open the top dossier on a thick pile of dossiers. “I am sorry to be the bearer of sad news,” he said, and he read from the page: “The following is a State Department advisory forwarded by the American embassy in Tel Aviv. ‘Please pass this information to Estelle Kastner: her father, Oscar Alexandrovich Kastner, suffered a heart attack at his home in Brooklyn five days ago.’”

  Stella’s eyes tightened into an anguished squint. “Oh my God, I’ve got to telephone Kastner immediately,” she whispered.

  Martin could tell from the dark expression on Asher’s face that there was no point to putting in a phone call. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I’m afraid Dante’s right,” Asher told Stella. His gaze fell on Martin. “There’s something the little canary wanted me to pass on to you, Dante. The body of a Chinese girl was discovered on the roof over your pool parlor. Her boss at a Chinese restaurant went looking for her when she didn’t turn up for work. She’d been stung to death by bees from one of your hives. Hell of a way to go, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yeah,” Martin agreed grimly. “I would say.”

  Neither Martin nor Stella said a word in the communal taxi for fear the driver or one of the other passengers might be working for the Shabak; both worried also that emotions would get the upper hand if one of them broke the comforting silence. Fifty minutes after leaving the airport they found themselves standing on a street corner in downtown Jerusalem. Heavy morning traffic flowed around them. Squads of soldiers, some of them dark skinned Ethiopians wearing green flak jackets and green berets, patrolled the streets, checking the identity papers of young men who looked as if they could be Arabs. Martin let six taxis pass before hailing the seventh. They took it to the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, where a line of Palestinian taxis queued on the street outside the hotel. A young Russian, in Israel for a chess tournament, was leaning over a chess board set up on the hood of a car parked outside the hotel entrance as a television camera filmed him. He was playing against himself, slamming the pieces down on the board as he made a dozen rapid moves, muttering all the while about a flaw in black’s position or the ineptness of white’s attack. Spotting an opening, he gleefully thrust the white pieces forward for the kill, then looked up and announced in English that black had resigned in the face of white’s dazzling attack.

  “How can he play against himself and remain sane?” Stella asked.

  “The advantage of playing against yourself is, unlike real life, you know what your opponent’s next move will be,” Martin observed.

  He waited until the first three Palestinian taxis had driven off with passengers before signaling to the fourth. “Mustaffah, at your beck and call,” announced the young Palestinian driver as he loaded their valises into the back of a yellow Mercedes that, judging from its appearance, had been around longer than the driver. “So to where?”

  “Kiryat Arba,” Stella said.

  The enthusiasm drained from Mustaffah’s eyes. “It will cost you a hundred twenty shekels or thirty dollars U.S.,” he said. “I only take you to the main gate. The Jews will not tolerate Arab taxis inside.”

  “Main gate will be fine,” Martin said as he and Stella settled onto the cracking leather of the back seat.

  Mustaffah’s plastic worry beads dangling from the rearview mirror tapped against the windshield as the taxi sped past fortress-like Israeli neighborhoods and bus stops swarming with religious Jews, and headed away from Jerusalem on a new highway that knifed south into the Judean Hills. On the rocky slopes on either side of the highway, knots of Palestinian men walked along dirt paths to avoid the Israeli checkpoints as they made their way into Jewish Jerusalem in the hope of finding a day’s work. In the wadis, boys who had climbed onto the high branches of trees could be seen picking olives and stuffing them under their open shirts.

  “You were tempting fate back at the airport,” Martin remarked. “I’m talking about when you started to unbutton your shirt to show Asher the night moth under your breast. What would you have done if he hadn’t stopped you?”

  Stella inched closer to Martin until her thigh was touching his; she badly wanted to be comforted. “I consider myself a pretty good judge of character,” she replied. “My instinct told me he would stop me, or at the very least avert his eyes.”

  “What about me?” Martin asked. “Did you think I’d avert my eyes?”

  Stella stared thro
ugh the grime on the window, remembering how she had clung to Kastner when she had hugged him good-bye; he had wheeled his chair away abruptly but she had still caught sight of the tears welling in his eyes. She turned to Martin. “Sorry. I was somewhere else. What did you say?”

  “I asked whether you thought I’d avert my eyes, too, if you started to show Asher the night moth supposedly tattooed under your breast.”

  “Not sure,” she admitted. “Haven’t figured you out yet.”

  “What’s to figure out?”

  “There are parts of you my instinct can’t get to. The heart of the matter is hidden under too many moods—it’s almost as if you were several different people. For one thing, I can’t decide if you are interested in women. I can’t decide if you want to seduce me, or not. Females need to get this detail right before they can have a working relationship with a man.”

  “Not,” Martin said without hesitation. “Trouble with women in general, and you in particular, is you’re incapable of being on the receiving end of courtesy without assuming seduction is behind it.” Martin thought of Minh coaxing erections out of his reluctant flesh during their occasional evenings together; he wondered if her death on the roof above the pool parlor had really been an accident. “Here’s the deal, Stella: I’m past seduction. When I’m backed up against a wall I make war, not love.”

  “That’s pain speaking,” Stella whispered, thinking of her own pain. “You ought to consider the possibility that intimacy can be a painkiller.”

  Martin shook his head. “My experience has been that you become intimate in order to have sex. Once the sex is out of the way, the intimacy only brings more pain.”

  Moving back to her side of the seat, Stella burst out in irritation, “It’s typical of the male of the species to think you become intimate in order to have sex. The female of the species has a more subtle take on the subject—she understands that you have sex in order to become intimate; that intimacy is the ultimate orgasm, since it allows you to get outside of the prison of yourself; get outside your skin and into the skin, the psyche, of another human being. Sex that leads to intimacy is a jailbreak.”