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?”

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 through 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.”

Mustaffah slowed for an Israeli checkpoint, but was waved through when two soldiers peered through the window and mistook the passengers for Jews heading back to one of the settlements. The taxi sped past roadside carts brimming with oranges and zucchinis and restaurants with kabob roasting on spits and garages with cars up on cinder blocks and mechanics flat on their backs underneath them. It slowed again for a flock of sheep that scattered when Mustaffah leaned on the horn. Young Arab women with babies strapped to their backs by a shawl, older women in long robes with heavy bundles balanced on their heads trudged along the side of the road, turning their faces away to avoid the dust kicked up by the Mercedes barreling past.

Half an hour out of Jerusalem, the taxi eased to a stop outside Kiryat Arba next to a sign that read: “Zionist Settlement—‘The more they torture him, the more he will become.’” Martin could see the two guards at the gate in the security fence watching them suspiciously. Both were armed with Uzis, with the ritual tzitzit jutting from under their bullet proof vests. While Stella retrieved the two valises from the trunk of the Mercedes, Martin walked around to the open passenger window to pay Mustaffah. From one of the minarets below, the recorded wail of the muezzin summoning the faithful to midday prayer drifted up to the Jewish settlement. Slipping three ten dollar bills through the window, Martin noticed that the framed license on the glove compartment had a photograph of Mustaffah, but identified him, in English, as Azzam Khouri.

“Why did you tell me your name was Mustaffah?” he asked the driver.

“Mustaffah, he was my brother killed by the Isra’ili army during the Intifada. We was both of us throwing stones at the Jewish tanks and they got mad and started throwing bullets back. Since, my mother calls me Mustaffah to pretend my brother is still being alive. Some days I call myself Mustaffah for the same reason. Somedays I’m not sure who I am. Today is such a day.”

The guards at the gate scrutinized the passports of the visitors. When Stella explained that she was there to see her sister, Ya’ara Ugor-Zhilov, they phoned up to the settlement, a sprawl of stone-faced apartment buildings and one-family houses spilling like lava down several once barren hills toward the Arab city of Hebron. Minutes later a battered pickup appeared at the top of the hill and slowly made its way, its spark plugs misfiring, past the playground teeming with mothers and little children to the gate. A moment later Stella and her sister were clinging to each other. Martin could see Stella talking quietly into the ear of her sister. Elena, or Ya’ara as she was now called, took a step back, shook her head vehemently, then burst into tears and fell back into her sisters arms. The driver of the pickup, a stocky, bearded man in his fifties, wearing black sneakers, a black suit, black tie and black fedora, approached Martin. He inspected him through windowpane-thick bifocals set into wire frames.

“Shalom to you, Mr. Martin Odum,” he said with a distinct Brooklyn accent. “I’m the rabbi Ben Zion. You need to be Stella’s detective friend. I’m right, right?”

“Right on both counts,” Martin said. “I’m a detective and I’m a friend.”

“It’s me, the rabbi who married Ya’ara to Samat,” Ben Zion announced. “If you’re trying to track down Samat and get poor Ya’ara a religious divorce, I’ll give you the time of day. If not, not.”

“How’d you know I was a detective? Or about my tracking down Samat?”

“A little canary told someone in the Shabak, and that someone told yours truly that two tourists who weren’t touring anything but Kiryat Arba could be expected to wash up on our doorstep. Miracle of miracles, here you are.” The rabbi raised a hand to shield his eyes from the noon sun and sized up the Brooklyn detective who had found his way to Kiryat Arba. “So you’re not Jewish, Mr. Odum.”

Behind them the two sisters started to walk up the hill, their arms around each other’s waists. Martin said, “How can you tell?”

Rabbi Ben Zion tossed his head in the direction of Hebron, visible through swells of heat rising from the floor of the valley below them. “You don’t live in the middle of a sea of Arabs without recognizing one of your own when you see him.”

“In other words, it’s a matter of instinct.”

“Survival instinct, developed over two thousand years.” The rabbi pitched the two valises into the back of the pickup. “So be my guest and climb in,” he ordered. “I’ll take you to Ya’ara’s apartment. We’ll get there before the girls and cook up water for tea, and light a memorial candle for her father—the canary told me about the death in the family, too, but I thought it would be better if Stella broke the bad news to her sister. Ask me nicely and I’ll tell you what I know about the missing husband.”

The rabbi threw the pickup into gear and, his sidecurls flying, gunned it up the hill, past the settlement post office, past the shopping center teeming with women in ankle length skirts and small boys wearing knitted yarmulke. Ya’ara, it turned out, lived in a small two-room apartment on the ground floor of one of the apartment buildings with a view of Hebron. “When her husband abandoned her, she had no resources of her own so our synagogue took her under its wing,” the rabbi explained. He searched through a ring of keys until he came to the right one and unlocked the door. The furnishings were Spartan. There was a narrow cot in one room, with a cracked mirror bordered with plastic sea shells over it and a wooden crate turned upside down serving as a night table. A folding bridge table covered with a square of oil cloth, a motley assortment of folding chairs with a small black-and-white television set on one of them, were scattered around what served as a living room. On the sill of a waist-high bookcase separating the living room from the tiny kitchen alcove were three flower pots containing plastic geraniums. Martin opened the door to the small bathroom. Women’s cotton underwear and several pairs of long woolen stockings hung from a cord stretched over the bathtub. Ben Zion noticed Martin’s expression as he returned to the living room. “We bought the furniture from Arabs whose houses were bulldozed between us and Hebron so we could walk to the Cave of Machpela safely.”

Martin strolled over to the window, raised the shade and looked out at the tangle of streets and buildings that made up Hebron. “What’s the Cave of Machpela?” he called over his shoulder.

The rabbi was in the kitchen alcove, attempting to light the gas burner with a match to boil water in a kettle. “Am I hearing you correctly? What’s the Cave of Machpela? It’s nothing less than the second holiest place for Jews on the planet earth, ranking immediately behind the Temple Mount or what’s left of it, the Wailing Wall. Hebron—which in biblical times was also called Kiryat Arba—is where the Patriarch Abraham bought his first dunams of land in Canaan. The Cave is where Abraham is buried; his sons Isaac and Jacob, his wife, Sarah, too. It is also holy to the Palestinians, who coopted our Abraham to be one of their prophets; they built a mosque on the spot and we are obliged to take turns praying at the cave.” Lighting a burner, the rabbi slid the kettle over the grill. Shaking his head in disbelief, he struck another match and lit a yortseit candle for the dead and carried it back into the room. “What is the Cave of Machpela?” he asked rhetorically, setting the candle on the table. “Even a shagetz ought to know the answer to that one. We always stroll down to the cave on Fridays at sunset to welcome the Sabbath in at this holy site. You and Stella are welcome to join us—that way you can tell the Shabak you actually did some sightseeing.”

Martin decided there’d been enough small talk. “What about Samat?”

Rabbi Ben Zion covered his mouth to smother a belch. “What about Samat?” he repeated.

“Did he run off with another woman?”

“Let me tell you something, Mr. Brooklyn detective who thinks men only leave their wives for other ladies. Samat didn’t need to quit his wife to have another lady—he rented all the ladies his libido desired. When he disappeared in his Honda for two, three days running, where do you think he went? It’s an open secret where he went. He went where a lot of men go when they want ladies to do things their wives won’t do. In Jaffa, in Tel Aviv, in Haifa, there are what my mother, may she rest in peace, used to call houses of ill repute where you can get your ashes hauled by ladies who don’t mind being naked with a man, who, for a price, are willing to do anything to satisfy a client.” The rabbi waved a hand in the general direction of the Mediterranean coast. “Samat had sexual appetites, you could see it in his eyes, you could tell it from the way he looked at his sister-in-law Estelle when she visited Kiryat Arba. Samat also had his share of obsessions that weren’t carnal. What I’m saying is, he had other axes to grind besides sex.”

In the kitchenette, the kettle began to shriek. The rabbi leaped to turn off the gas and set about preparing tea. He returned moments later carrying the kettle and four china cups, which he put on the bridge table next to the memorial candle. Leaning over the table the better to see what he was doing, Ben Zion slipped Lipton tea bags into the four cups and filled the first one with boiling water. When Martin waved it away, he took the cup himself and sank onto one of the folding chairs, his knees apart, his feet flat on the floor and tapping impatiently. Martin scraped over another chair and sat down facing him.

“Why would someone like Samat, who needed to visit houses of ill repute to satisfy his lusts, marry a religious woman whom he had never met?”

“Am I inside Samat’s head to know the answer?” The rabbi blew noisily across the cup, then touched his lips to the tea to test the temperature. Deciding it was too hot to drink, he set it down on the table. “He was a strange bird, this Samat. I am Ya’ara’s rabbi. In the Jewish religion we don’t confess to our spiritual leaders the way Catholics do. But we confide in them. I believed Ya’ara when she said that Samat never touched her on her wedding night, or after. He never slept in the marriage bed. For all I know she may still be a virgin. When Samat was living under the same roof with her, she was absolutely convinced something was wrong with her. I tried to persuade her that the something that was wrong was wrong with him. I tried to persuade him, too.”

“Did you succeed?”

The rabbi shook his head cheerlessly. “To use an old Yiddish expression, I never got to first base with Samat.”

“What was he doing here?”

“Hiding.”

“From what? From whom?”

The rabbi tried his tea again. This time he managed to sip at it. “What am I, a reader of minds? How would I know, from what, from whom? Look, coming to live in one of these Jewish settlements in the middle of all these Arabs is a little like joining the French foreign legion: When you sign on the dotted line, nobody asks to see your curriculum vitae, we’re just glad to have your warm body. What I do know is that Samat went to the Kiryat Arba security officer and asked for a weapon. He said it was to protect his wife if the Hamas terrorists ever attacked.”

“Did he get the weapon?”

The rabbi nodded. “Anybody living in a settlement who can see what he’s shooting at can get a weapon.” Ben Zion remembered another detail. “Samat evidently had an endless supply of money. He paid for everything he bought with cash—an upscale split-level house on the side of Kiryat Arba where you get to enjoy the sunsets, a brand new Japanese car with air conditioning. He never played pinochle with the boys, he never accompanied Ya’ara to the synagogue, even on the high holy days, though it didn’t go unnoticed that she always left an envelope stuffed with cash in the charity box. Admit it, Mr. American detective, I’ll bet you don’t know that shamus is a Yiddish word.”

“I thought it was Irish.”

“Irish!” The rabbi slapped a palm against one of his knees. “The shamus was the synagogue beetle, which was the sobriquet for the member of the congregation who took care of the synagogue.” Ben Zion shook his head in puzzlement. “How, I ask you, is it possible to detect an AWOL husband if you can’t detect the origin of the word shamus?”

The sudden arrival of Ya’ara and Stella saved Martin from having to account for this lapse in his education; it also provided him with his first good look at Samat’s wife. She was a short, overweight woman with a teenager’s pudgy face and a matronly body endowed with an ample bosom that put a strain on the buttons of her blouse; Martin feared that one of them would pop at any moment. In the space between the buttons he caught a glimpse of the pink fabric of a heavy brassiere. She wore an ankle-length skirt popular with Lubavitch women and a round flat-brimmed felt hat that she nervously twisted on her head, as if she were trying to find the front. The little patches of skin on her body that Martin could see were chalk white from lack of being exposed to sun light. Her cheeks were streaked with traces of tears. Stella, dry eyed, wore the ghost of a smile fixed on her lips that Martin had noticed the day she turned up at his pool parlor.

The rabbi bounded to his feet when the women appeared at the door; Ya’ara stopped to kiss the mezuzah before she came in. Grabbing one of her hands in both of his, bending at the waist so that his head was level with hers, the rabbi bombarded her with a burst of Hebrew which, to the shamus’s ear, sounded more Brooklyn than biblical. Martin concluded that the rabbi was offering condolences because Ya’ara started sobbing again; tears cascaded down her cheeks and soaked into the tightly buttoned collar of her blouse. Ben Zion led Ya’ara to the yortseit candle and, rocking back and forth on the soles of his sneakers, started praying in Hebrew. Ya’ara, blotting her tears on the back of a sleeve, joined in.

“Aren’t you going to pray for your father?” Martin whispered to Stella.

“I only pray for the living,” she retorted fiercely.

When the prayer ended the rabbi excused himself to organize the Sabbath pilgrimage to the Cave of Machpela, and Martin got his first opportunity to talk to Stella’s sister. “I’m sorry about your father,” he began.

She accepted this with a shy closing of her lids. “I was not expecting him to die, and certainly not of a heart attack. He had the heart of a lion. After all he had been through—” She shrugged weakly.

“Your sister has hired me to find Samat so that you can get a religious divorce.”

Ya’ara turned on Stella. “What good will a divorce do me?”

“It is a matter of pride,” Stella insisted. “You can’t let him get away with this.”

Martin steered the conversation back to matters of tradecraft. “Do you have anything of his—a book he once read, a telephone he once used, a bottle of alcohol he once poured a drink from, a toothbrush even? Anything at all?”

Ya’ara shook her head. “There was stationery with a London letterhead but it disappeared and I don’t remember the address on it. Samat filled a trunk with personal belongings and paid two boys to carry it down to the taxi when he left. He even took the photographs of our wedding. The only photograph left of him was the one Stella snapped after the ceremony and sent to our father.” At the mention of their father, tears trickled down her cheeks again. “How could Samat do this to a wife, I ask you?”

“Stella told me he was always talking on the phone,” Martin said. “Did he initiate the calls or did people call him?”

“Both.”

“So there must be phone records showing the numbers he dialed.”

Again she shook her head. “The rabbi asked the security office here to try and get the phone numbers. Someone even drove to Tel Aviv to interview the phone company. He reported back that the numbers were all on a magnetic tape that had been erased by error. There was no trace of the numbers he called.”

“What language did he use when he spoke on the phone?”

“English. Russian. Armenian sometimes.”

“Did you ever ask him what he did for a living?”

“Once.”

Stella said, “What did he say?”

“At first he didn’t answer. When I pressed him, he told me he ran a business selling Western-manufactured artificial limbs to people who had lost legs to Russian land mines in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kurdistan. He said he could have made a fortune but was selling them at cost.”

“And you believed him?” Stella asked.

“I had no reason not to.” Ya’ara’s eyes suddenly widened. “Someone once called when he wasn’t here and left a phone number for him to call back. I thought it might have something to do with these artificial limbs and wrote it down on the first thing that came to hand, which was the back of a recipe, and then copied it onto the pad next to the telephone. I tore off the page and gave it to Samat when he returned to the house that day and he went to the bedroom and dialed a number. I remember that the conversation was very agitated. At one point Samat was even yelling into the phone, and he kept switching from English to Russian and back to English again.”

“The recipe,” Stella said softly. “Do you still have it?”

Both Stella and Martin could see Ya’ara hesitate. “You would not be betraying your husband,” Martin said. “If and when we find him, we are only going to make sure you get the famous get so you can go on with your life.”

“Samat owes that much to you,” Stella said.

Sighing, moving as if her limbs were weighted down by gravity, Ya’ara pushed herself to her feet and shuffled into the kitchen alcove and pulled a tin box from one of the wall cupboards. She carried it back to the living room, set it on the folding table, opened the lid and began thumbing through printed recipes that she had torn out of Elle magazine over the years. She pulled the one for apple strudel out of the box and turned it over. A phone number starting with the country code 44 and city code 171 was scrawled on the back in pencil. Martin produced a felt tipped pen and copied the number into a small notebook.

“Where is that?” Stella asked Martin.

“Forty-four is England, 171 is London,” he said. He turned back to Stella. “Did Samat ever leave Kiryat Arba?” he asked.

“Once, sometimes twice a week, he drove off by himself, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for several days.”

“Do you have any idea where he went?”

“The one time I asked him he told me it was not the business of a wife to keep track of a husband.”

Stella looked brightly at Martin. “We went with him once, Martin.” She smiled at her half sister. “Don’t you remember, Elena—”

“My name is Ya’ara now,” Stella’s sister reminded her coldly.

Stella was not put off. “It was when I came for the wedding,” she said excitedly. “I had to be at Ben-Gurion Airport at seven in the evening for my flight back to New York. Samat was going somewhere for lunch. He said if we didn’t mind killing time, he had to see someone on the coast and could drop me at the airport on the way back to Kiryat Arba.”

“I remember that,” Ya’ara said. “We made bologna sandwiches and packed them in a paper bag and took a plastic bottle of apple juice.” She sighed again. “That was one of the happiest days of my life,” she added.

Stella said to Martin, “He drove north from Tel Aviv along the expressway and got off at the exit marked ‘Caesarea.’ There was a labyrinth of streets but he never hesitated, he seemed to know his way around very well. He dropped us on the edge of the sand dunes near some A-frame houses. We could see those giant chimneys down the coast that produced electricity.”

Ya’ara’s face lit up for the first time in Martin’s presence; the smile almost made her look handsome. “I wore an enormous straw hat to protect my face from the sun,” she recalled. “We ate in the shade of a eucalyptus tree and then hunted for Roman coins in the sand.”

“And what did Samat do while you were scouring the dunes for Roman coins?” Martin asked.

The girls looked at each other. “He never told us. He picked us up at the A-frames at five-thirty and dropped me off at the airport at six-forty.”

“Uh-huh,” Martin said, his brows knitting as he began to fit the first blurred pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into place.

Martin took a tiny address book (tradecraft ruled: Everyone in it was identified by nickname and phone numbers were masked in a simple cipher) from his pocket and used his AT&T card to call Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant (listed in the address book as “Glutamate”) under the pool parlor on Albany Avenue in Crown Heights. Given the time difference, Tsou would be presiding from the high stool behind the cash register, glowering at the waitress who had replaced Minh if she failed to push the more expensive dishes on the menu. “Peking duck hanging in window for two days,” he’d once informed Minh, his gold teeth glistening with saliva, his face a mask of earnestness (so she had gleefully recounted to Martin), “is aphlodisiac, good for elections.”

“Xing’s Mandalin,” a high pitched voice—so distinct it could have been coming from the next room—announced when the phone on the other end was picked up. “Filled up at lunch, same tonight. No flea table until lunch Sunday.”

“Don’t hang up,” Martin cried into the phone. “Tsou, it’s me, Martin.”

Yin shi, from where you calling, huh?”

Martin knew that Fred would be keeping track of his whereabouts through Asher and the Israeli Shabak, so he figured he was not giving anything away if he told the truth.

“I’m in Israel.”

“Islael the Jewish kingdom or Islael the Jewish delicatessen on Kingston Avenue?” Tsou didn’t wait for an answer. “You know about Minh, huh?”

“That’s why I’m calling. Tell me what happened, Tsou.”

The story spurted out. “She goes up to check the hives the way you asked. She does not come back. Clients begin to fidget. No food in sight. I go out back and shout up ‘Minh.’ She does not shout back. I climb file escape, find Minh laying on back, not moving, not conscious, clazy bees stinging life out of Minh’s face. Disgusting. Makes me want to vomit. Call police on loft phone, Matin, hope you do not mind, let them into loft when they ling bell, they put on face masks and chase bees with can of Laid found below sink, they take Minh away in ambulance, face bloated big like basketball. She dead before ambulance leach hospital, Matin. Minh’s death makes page two Daily News, big headline say ‘Deadly Bees Kill Clown Heights Woman.’“

“What did the police say, Tsou?”

“Two detectives come for lunch next day, sons of bitches leave without paying check, I wave it in faces but they do not take hint. They ask about you and I tell them what I know, which is nothing. They tell me ASPCA in white clothing came to kill bees. They tell me hive exploded, which is what made bees clazy to attack Minh. Comes as news to me honey can explode.”

Through the window Martin could see the orange streaks of sunset in the sky and the rabbi assembling a group of settlers for the stroll down the road toward Hebron and the Cave of Machpela. “It comes as news to me, too,” he said very softly.

“What you say?” Tsou shouted.

“I said, honey doesn’t normally explode.”

“Huh. So. Detectives, they say Minh not even Minh’s name, she illegal immigrant from Taiwan named Chun-chiao. Business picked up when Daily News ran name Xing’s Mandolin on page two even though they spelled Xing ‘Zing.’ I admit it, whole thing leave bad taste in my mouth. Velly upsetting.”

Martin assumed Tsou was referring to Minh’s death. “Yeah, very,” he agreed.

Tsou, however, seemed to be more concerned with Minh’s false identity than her death. “Cannot believe anyone anymore these days, huh, yin shi? Minh not Minh. Maybe you not Matin.”

“Maybe the Daily News was right,” Martin said, “maybe your real name is Tsou Zing with a ‘Z.’“

“Maybe,” Tsou agreed with a sour laugh. “Who can say?”

With Rabbi Ben Zion and Martin strolling along in the lead and the two Kastner sisters bringing up the rear, the group of thirty or so ultranationalist orthodox settlers, the men sporting tzitzit and embroidered yarmulkes, the women in ankle-length skirts and long sleeved blouses and head scarves, made their way down the road toward the Cave of Machpela to greet the Sabbath at the holy site where the Patriarch Abraham was said to be buried. Two policemen wearing blue uniforms and blue baseball caps, along with half a dozen of the younger settlers, walked on either side of the group, rifles or Uzis slung over their shoulders.

The sun had disappeared behind the hills and the darkness was starting to blot out the twilight between the buildings. Instinctively, the murky dusk left Martin feeling queasy. Agents who worked the field liked daylight because they could see danger coming, and night-time because they could hide from it; the penumbra between the two offered none of the advantages of either. The massive fortress-like structure built over the sacred cave loomed ahead like a ship adrift in a fog.

“What do the Palestinians here think of your pilgrimages to the shrine?” Martin asked the rabbi, all the while inspecting the spaces between the Palestinian houses off to the right for any telltale sign of activity. Martin tensed as a shard of light ricocheted off a roof; as his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness, he realized it was nothing more than a lingering sliver of sunlight glinting off the solar heating panels atop a three-story building.

“The Palestinians,” the rabbi replied, waving toward the surrounding houses, “say we’re walking on their toes.”

“You are, aren’t you?”

The rabbi shrugged. “Look, it’s not as if we’re being unreasonable. Those of us who believe the Lord God gave this land to Abraham and his descendants for eternity are willing to let the Palestinians remain here as long as they accept that the land is ours.”

“What about the others?”

“They can emigrate.”

“That doesn’t leave them—or you, for that matter—much room for maneuver.”

“It’s easy for visitors to come here from the outside and criticize, Mr. Odum, and then fly back to the safety of their country, their city, their homes …”

“My home,” Martin ventured, “turns out to be less safe than I thought.” He made a mental note to get more details of the death of Stella’s father. He wondered if there had been an autopsy.

“You’re talking about crime in the streets. It’s nothing compared to what we have to put up with here.”

“I was talking about exploding honey—”

“Come again—I must be missing something.”

“Private joke.”

Eyeing potential danger areas, Martin spotted a spark in an alley-way between two Palestinian homes to his right and uphill from the group of settlers walking toward the cave. Suddenly flames erupted and a blazing tire, thick black smoke billowing from it, started rolling downhill toward them. As the settlers scattered to get out of its path, the short hollow cough of a high-powered rifle resounded through the neighborhood and a spurt of dust materialized in the road immediately ahead of Martin. His old reflexes kicked in—he figured out what was going on in an instant. The tire was the diversion; the rifle shot had come from the other side of the road, probably from the top of the cement cistern a hundred and fifty yards away on a small rise. The two policemen and the settlers armed with weapons had reacted instinctively and were charging uphill in the direction of the alleyway where the tire had come from. One of the policemen was shouting into a walkie-talkie. Back at Kiryat Arba, a siren, its pitch rising as it whimpered into life, began shrieking across the countryside.

“The shot came from behind us,” Martin shouted and he lunged for cover behind a low stone wall as the second shot nicked the dirt a yard beyond the spot where he’d been standing. Crouching behind the wall, massaging the muscles in his bad leg, Martin could see Stella and her sister, with her skirt hiked, running back up the hill toward the settlement, which was ablaze with searchlights sweeping the area. Moments later two Israeli jeeps and an open truck filled with soldiers came roaring down the road from the nearby army base. Leaping from their vehicles, the soldiers, bent low and running, charged the slopes on either side of the road. From behind the cistern came the staccato sound of automatic rifles being fired in short bursts. Martin suspected that the Palestinian rifleman—assuming he was Palestinian—had melted away and the soldiers were shooting at shadows.

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.”

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