Legends

by Robert Littell

  Martin said, “Samat’s wife mentioned that he once dropped her on the dunes in Caeserea while he went to see someone. Now I know whom he saw.”

  Benny’s pot-luck supper consisted of cold dishes he’d brought back in a doggie bag from an Arab restaurant in Abu Gosh and a bottle of red wine from the Golan. Martin, who didn’t eat meat, made do with the vegetable dishes. Later, Benny broke out a bottle of fifteen-year-old French cognac and carefully poured some into two snifters. “There was an office bash when I retired last year,” he explained. “This was one of my going away presents, along with a jockstrap medal for long and loyal service.”

  “How many years?”

  “Forty two.”

  “Could Israel have survived without the Mossad?” Martin asked.

  “Of course. We got as much wrong as we got right. We messed up badly in seventy-three—we told Golda Meir that the Egyptians wouldn’t be ready to wage war for at least ten years. A few weeks later they swarmed across the Suez canal and overran our Bar Lev fortresses stretched along the Israeli side of the waterway.”

  “What went wrong?” Martin asked.

  “I suppose the same thing that went wrong in the middle and late eighties when your CIA failed to predict the breakup of the Soviet empire and the demise of the communist system. Looking in from the outside, which is what I do these days, I can see that intelligence services are fatally flawed. They’re self-tasking—they define the threats and then try to neutralize them. Threats that don’t get defined slip through the mesh and suddenly turn up as full-blown disasters, at which point those who are outside the intelligence community start yapping about how we’ve been asleep on the job. We haven’t been asleep. We’ve just been defining it differently.”

  “They say a camel is a horse designed by committee,” Martin said. “For my money, the CIA is an intelligence agency designed by the same committee.”

  Benny shrugged. “For me, Dante, it all comes down to that dead dog at the side of the road in Lebanon, the one that exploded and decapitated my son. If we had been doing the job we were paid to do, we would have anticipated the dead dog filled with PETN, and identified the terrorist behind it. I have trouble … I have trouble getting past that reality.” Benny climbed heavily to his feet. “I think I’ll turn in now, if you don’t mind. The bed’s made in the room next to the downstairs bathroom. Sleep well.”

  “I never sleep well,” Martin murmured; he, too, was having trouble getting past the dead dog that decapitated Benny’s son. “I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat.”

  An ugly grin deformed Benny’s lips. “Occupational disease, for which there is no known cure.”

  The next morning Benny drove Martin into Jerusalem and let him off at the bus station. “One departs for Tel Aviv every twenty minutes,” he said. He handed him a slip of paper. “Phone number for Akim in Caesarea. It’s unlisted. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him where you got it. I’ll nose around about the phone company’s magnetic tapes and let you know what I find out. By the way, Samat’s not in Israel. Shabak says he flew to London two days before the rabbi at Kiryat Arba reported him missing.”

  “Thanks, Benny.”

  “You’re welcome, Dante. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  “I’ve trimmed my sails, Benny. I am thankful for light winds.”

  From the brick guard shack atop the high wall surrounding Akim Ugor-Zhilov’s seaside villa in Caesarea, Martin could almost hear the hiss as the sun knifed into the western Mediterranean. “Great view,” Akim said, though he was standing with his back to it, sizing up his visitor, trying to figure out if his three-piece suit was custom made or off the rack. The livid sickle-shaped scar slashing across his high forehead over his right eye and vanishing into a long sideburn appeared to shimmer. “The Israelis think you are an Irishman named Pippen,” Akim was saying, his heavy Russian accent surfacing indolently from the depths of his throat. “Then someone named Odum—which was the name on the passport you used to enter the country a week ago today—calls me from a phone booth in Tel Aviv and invites himself over to my house. Needless to say, the fact that a name is on a passport does not mean nothing. So which is it, friend, Pippen or Odum?”

  “The answer is complicated—”

  “Simplify.”

  Martin decided to stick close to the truth. “Pippen was a pseudonym I used years ago when I worked as a freelance explosive expert. Odum is the name I’ve been using since.”

  Akim brightened. “Pseudonyms are something I can relate to. In Soviet Russia, everybody who was anybody used them. You have heard of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov? He was known as Lenin, after the River Lena in Siberia. Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the alias Stalin, which meant steel, which is how he wanted people to think of him. Lev Davidovich Bronstein escaped from prison with the help of a passport made out in the name of one of his jailers, a certain Trotsky. Me myself, I managed to avoid being sent with my two brothers to the gulag by adopting the identity of a sleight-of-hand magician named Melor Semyonovich Zhitkin. You are familiar with the gulag? That’s where temperatures fall below minus fifty and alcohol freezes and you suck on vodka icicles carefully so they do not stick to your tongue. Using the name Melor was a stroke of genius, even if it is me who says so. Melor is a Soviet name, stands for Marx-Engels-Lenin-Organizers-of-Revolution, which made the KGB think I was a diehard communist. I was diehard all right,” he added with a sinister cackle. “They could not kill me, which is what made me diehard.”

  Without blinking one of his heavy lids or narrowing his eyes, Akim’s expression turned hard. Martin wondered how he did it. Perhaps it was the shadows playing on his face, perhaps the pupils of his eyes had actually grown smaller. Whatever it was, the effect was chilling.

  Akim’s voice shed its laziness. “Pippen was an agent for the American Central Intelligence Agency who infiltrated the Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley posing as a freelance explosive expert with connections to the IRA. You and the CIA are said to have parted company, though I am embarrassed to say none of my sources knows why. You are startled to see how well informed I am, right? You see, in Israel, as in every civilized country, information can be purchased as easily as toothpaste. Now you claim to be a Brooklyn, New York, detective named Odum. There are some who think this is simply another fabricated identity. There are others who say Odum is who you were before you were Pippen.”

  “I did work for the CIA once. I no longer do. Odum is as close to the real me as I can get.”

  Akim accepted this with a wary nod. “Time for my insulin shot,” he announced. He beckoned with a pinky bearing a heavy gold ring with a diamond set into it. Martin followed him down the narrow steps and across the lawn, past the swimming pool where three women in diaphanous dresses with low necklines were playing mahjongg; he suddenly longed for the days when he investigated uncomplicated things like mahjongg debts and kidnapped dogs and Chechen-run crematoriums in Little Odessa. He must have been off his rocker to think he could trace a husband who had jumped ship. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child’s play by comparison. Akim reached the shaded veranda behind the mansion and motioned Martin to one of the deck chairs. Two of Akim’s Armenians, wearing sports jackets that didn’t conceal the automatic pistols in their shoulder holsters, stood nearby. A male nurse dressed in a white hospital smock was squirting liquid through a needle to expel any air left in the syringe. Akim collapsed into a deck chair and tugged the tails of his shirt out of his trousers to bare a bulging stomach. He sipped fresh orange juice through a plastic straw as the male nurse jabbed the needle under his dry skin and injected the insulin.

  “Thanks a lot, Earl. See you tomorrow morning.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. Zhitkin.”

  When the male nurse was out of ear shot, Akim said, “As you can see I still use the name Zhitkin from time to time. Funny how you become attached to an alias that saved your life.” At the pool, one of the women shrieked with pleasure. Akim burst out
angrily, “Keep it quiet, ladies. Don’t you see I have a visitor?” Massaging the spot on his stomach where the insulin had been injected, he said, “So what do you think I can do for you, Mr. Pippen or Mr. Odum or whatever your name is today?”

  “I really am a detective,” Martin said. “I was hired to find your nephew, Samat, who seems to have skipped out on his wife. I was hoping you would tell me where to start looking.”

  “What’s she want, the wife, alimony payments? A piece of his bank account, assuming he has got a bank account? What?”

  “I was hired by the wife’s sister and father—”

  “Who is a dead man now.”

  “You are well informed. They hired me to find Samat and get him to give her a divorce. She’s religious. Without the divorce she can’t marry again, can’t have children with another man.”

  Akim tucked the tails of his shirt back into his trousers. “You have met the wife in question?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You have seen how she dresses? Who would marry her? Who would fuck her even to have children?”

  “She’s young. She may even be a virgin. The rabbi who married her thinks she and Samat never slept together.”

  Akim waved his hand in disgust. “Rabbi needs to stick to the bible. I do not want to hear private things about my nephew. Who he fucks—whether he fucks—is not my business.”

  Another Armenian shouted something in a strange language from the driveway guard house. Akim said, “My people want to turn on the spotlights after dark, but the neighbors complain to the police. Every time we turn them on the police come around and order us to turn them off. What kind of a country is this where a man of means cannot light up the wall around his property? It is like as if they personally hold being rich against me.”

  Martin said, “Maybe what they hold against you is the way you got rich.”

  “I am starting to like you,” Akim admitted. “You talk to me the way I talked to people like me when I was your age. Fact is if I did not get rich, someone else would have got rich in my place. Making money was the only thing to do when the Soviet Union disintegrated—it was a matter of not drowning in Gorbachev’s perestroika, because only the rich were able to keep their heads above water. Anyway, America brought it on, the collapse, the gangsters, the mob wars, all of it.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re driving at,” Martin remarked.

  “I am driving at history, Mr. Odum. In 1985 the Saudi oil minister, who happened to be a big wheel in the OPEC oil cartel, announced to the world that Saudi Arabia would no longer limit production to support oil prices. You want to sit there and tell me the Americans had nothing to do with this? Eight months later oil prices had plummeted seventy percent. Oil and gas exports is what kept the Soviet Union afloat for years, even for decades. The fall in oil prices started the economy downhill. Gorbachev tried to save what could be saved with his half-baked reforms, but the ship sank under his feet. When things quieted down, Russia’s borders had shrunk to where they were in 1613. It is people like me and my brother who started poking through the debris and picking up the pieces. If things are better today for the masses it is because money has been trickling down. Ha! It is an economic fact that in order for wealth to trickle down, you need to have rich people at the top to do the trickling.”

  “If I’m reading you correctly, you are a born-again capitalist.”

  “I am a born-again opportunist. I did not go to school like Samat—I learned what I learned in the gutter. I understand capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Do not smile, Mr. Odum. The villain was your Genry Ford. By inventing the assembly line and mass producing his cars, he lowered the price to where the assembly-line workers became consumers of their own products. And with buy-now, pay-later schemes and plastic credit cards, people were able to spend money before they accumulated it. Instant gratification killed the Protestant work ethic, which glorified work and encouraged saving. Remember you heard it here first, Mr. Odum: America is on a slippery slope. It will not be far behind the Soviet Union in crashing.”

  “What will be left?”

  “We will be left. The Oligarkhs.”

  One of Akim’s bodyguards came around the side of the house to the veranda. He caught Akim’s eye and tapped a fingernail against the crystal on his Rolex. Akim swung his short legs off the deck chair and stood up. “I am meeting a member of the knesset for supper in Peta Tikva,” he said. “Let us stop circling each other like wrestlers, Mr. Odum. Wears out shoe leather.” Waving to the women playing mahjongg, he shouted something in Armenian. Then, gesturing for Martin to accompany him, he started toward the enormous SUV parked in the driveway, exhaust streaming from its silver tail pipe. “How much they paying you to find Samat?” he demanded.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Akim stopped in his tracks and eyed Martin. Once again his face turned menacing without so much as his moving a muscle. “Are you thick in the skull or what?” he said, his voice a low, lazy growl. “Do I have to spell this out? Okay, I am asking what the wife’s sister’s father, who is a dead man, offered you to find my nephew Samat. I am saying that whatever he offered is nothing alongside what I will put on the table if you can lead me to him. What would you think of one million American dollars in cash? Or the equivalent in Swiss francs or German marks.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Akim groaned in exasperation. “You do not need to get it,” he insisted. He started toward the car again. “A hundred and thirty million U.S. dollars have disappeared from six of my holding companies around the world that Samat controlled. That mouse of a wife in Kiryat Arba is not the only one wants a divorce. Me, too, I want one. I want to divorce my nephew. I want him to become my ex-nephew. So do we have an arrangement, Mr. Odum? You have my phone number. If you get your hands on Samat before I get my hands on him, pick up the phone and give me a call and you will become a rich man. Then you will be the one to trickle down to the proletariat so they can buy more of Mr. Genry Ford’s automobiles.”

  Stella and Martin hefted their valises onto the table and opened the locks. One of the female soldiers, wearing white surgical gloves, started to rummage through the contents. The other female soldier, her eyes black with mascara, began asking questions and ticking off items on a clipboard when she heard the answers. Had anyone given them a parcel to take out of Israel? Who had packed their valises? Had the valises been left alone after they were packed? What was the purpose of their trip to Israel? Had they been to any Arab towns or villages or the Arab sections of Jerusalem? How had they come to the airport? Had the valises been in sight all the time after they got out of the taxi?

  Finally the young woman looked up. “You are traveling together?”

  “Yes,” Martin replied.

  “Excuse me for being personal but you do not have the same family name.”

  “We’re just friends,” Stella told her.

  “Excuse me again but how long have you known each other?”

  “Something like two weeks now,” Martin said.

  “And you decided to come to Israel together after knowing each other only two weeks?”

  Stella bristled. “Is it written that people have to be lovers in order to travel together?”

  “I am only asking the questions that we’re instructed to put to all the passengers.” She addressed Stella. “I see from your tickets that you both came to Israel from Athens. But your friend is flying to London and you are flying to New York. If you’re traveling together, why are you no longer traveling together?”

  “I’m returning to New York to bury Kastner,” Stella explained.

  “Who is Kastner?”

  “My father.”

  “You call your father by his family name?”

  “I call my father whatever I damn well decide to call him.”

  The young woman said, “So your father is dead.” She jotted something on the space reserved for comments.

  “I’m n
ot planning to bury him alive, if that’s what you mean.”

  The woman remained unfazed. “You are traveling under an American passport but you speak English with a slight East European accent.”

  “It’s a Russian accent, actually. I immigrated to the United States from Russia nine years ago.”

  “At that period Soviet borders were not open to people who wanted to emigrate. How did you get out of the Soviet Union?”

  Stella squinted at her interrogator. “My father and my sister and I went on vacation to the Black Sea in Bulgaria. The American CIA slipped us Greek passports and we joined a tour ship returning through the Bosporus to Piraeus.”

  The two female soldiers exchanged looks. “Airport security is not a joking matter,” snapped the one searching the luggage.

  “There was a time in my life when I was paid for being funny,” Stella retorted. “This is not one of them.”

  The young woman with the clipboard raised a walkie-talkie to her lips and muttered something in Hebrew. “Wait here a moment,” she ordered. She walked over to two men in civilian clothing and, pointing with her face at Stella and Martin, said something to them. One of the men pulled a small notebook from his pocket and thumbed through it until he came to the page he was looking for. He glanced over at Martin and then handed the female soldier an envelope. The girl shrugged. Returning to the table, she passed the envelope to Martin. “You can close your valises and check in now.”

  “What was that all about?” Stella asked Martin after they had presented their passports and boarding passes and gone up the escalator to the vast waiting room.

  Martin slit open the envelope with a forefinger and unfolded the sheaf of paper in it. “Uh-huh,” he muttered.

  “Uh-huh what?”

  “My old Mossad friend, the one who fed me pot-luck supper, says the magnetic tapes showing incoming and outgoing calls from Kiryat Arba were erased, just as the rabbi said. But they weren’t erased by error. The Mossad did it as a favor for their CIA colleagues.”