1997: MARTIN ODUM MEETS A BORN-AGAIN OPPORTUNIST
BENNY SAPIR LISTENED INTENTLY TO MARTIN’S ACCOUNT OF THE incident in Hebron. When he finally broke his silence it was to pose questions only a professional would think to ask.
“How can you be sure it wasn’t some Arab kids letting off steam? That kind of thing happens all the time around Kiryat Arba.”
“Because of the diversion. The attack was synchronized. The tire came first. Everyone looked off to the right. The two cops and the armed settlers raced uphill to the right. That’s when the first shot was fired. It came from the left.”
“How many shots were there?”
“Two.”
“And both of them hit the road near you?”
“The shooter’s rifle must have been pulling to the left. The first shot hit a yard or so ahead of me, which means he was firing short and left. The shooter must have cranked in a correction to the rear sight and elevated slightly. The second shot was on target—it hit beyond where I’d been standing, which means the bullet would have hit my chest if I hadn’t leaped for cover behind the low wall.”
“Why didn’t he shoot again?”
“Fact that he didn’t is what makes me think he was shooting at me. When I disappeared from view behind the low wall, there were still a dozen or so settlers crouching or lying flat on the ground. The search lights from Kiryat Arba were sweeping the area so he could easily see them. If he was shooting in order to kill Jews, he had plenty of targets available.”
“Maybe the lights and the siren scared him off.”
“Soldiers scared him off. But that happened five, maybe eight minutes later.”
“Beseder, okay. So why would someone want to kill you, Dante?”
“Retirement hasn’t dulled your edge, Benny. You’re asking the right questions in the right order. Once we figure out the ‘why,’ we move on to the ‘who.’”
Returning to Jerusalem from Kiryat Arba (Stella had remained behind to be with her sister), Martin had braved the rank stench of a phone booth and had asked information for the phone number of a Benny Sapir. He was given five listings under that name. The second one, in a settlement community thirteen kilometers outside of Jerusalem, turned out to be the Benny Sapir who had briefed Dante Pippen in Washington before the mission to the Bekaa Valley eight years before; Benny, normally the Mossad’s point man on things Russian, had been covering for a colleague home on sick leave at the time. When he came on line now, Benny, who had retired from the Mossad the previous year, sounded winded. He recognized the voice on the other end of the phone immediately. “The older I get, the harder it is to remember faces and names, but voices I never forget,” he said. “Tell you the truth, Dante, never expected our paths to cross again.” Before Martin could say anything, Benny proposed to pick him up in front of the Rashamu Restaurant down from the Jewish shouk on Ha-Eshkol Street in half an hour.
Exactly on time, a spanking new Skoda pulled up in front of the restaurant and the driver, a muscular man with the body of a wrestler, honked twice. Benny’s hair had gone gray and his once-famous smile had turned melancholy since Martin had last seen him, eight years before, standing at the foot of his hospital bed in Haifa. “Lot of water’s flowed under the bridge since we last saw each other, Dante,” Benny said as Martin slid onto the passenger seat. “You sure it wasn’t blood?” Martin shot back, and they both laughed at the absence of humor in the exchange. At the intersection ahead of them, two Israeli soldiers of Ethiopian origin were frisking an Arab boy carrying a tray filled with small porcelain cups of Turkish coffee. “So you are going by the name of Martin Odum these days,” Benny noted, wheeling the car into traffic and heading out of Jerusalem in the direction of Tel Aviv. The one-time spymaster glanced quickly at the American. “Sorry about that, Dante, but I was obliged to touch base with the Shabak.”
“I would have done the same thing in your shoes.”
It was obvious Benny felt bad about it. “Question of guarding one’s flanks,” he mumbled, apologizing a second time. “The people who run the show these days are a new breed—cross them and your pension checks start arriving late.”
“I understand,” Martin said again.
“Be careful what you tell me,” Benny warned. “They want me to file a contact report after I’ve seen you. They’re not quite sure what you’re doing here.”
“Me, also, I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here,” Martin admitted. “Where we going, Benny?”
“Har Addar. I live there. I invite you for pot-luck supper. You can sleep over if you need a bed for the night. Does Martin Odum have a legend?”
“He’s a private detective working out of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.”
Benny rocked his head from side to side in appreciation. “Why not? A detective is as good a cover as any and better than most. I’ve used various legends in my time—my favorite, which was my cover when I was running agents in what used to be called the Soviet Union, was a defrocked English priest living in sin in Istanbul. The sin part was the fun part. To support my cover story, I had to practically memorize the Gospels. Never got over the trauma of reading John. If you’re looking for the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, you don’t have to go further than the Gospel According to John, which, by the way, wasn’t written by the disciple named John. Whoever wrote the text commandeered his name. Now that I think of it, you could make the case that this is an example of an early Christian legend.”
Benny turned off the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and was wending his way up through the hills west of Jerusalem toward Har Addar when Martin asked him if the agents he’d run in the former USSR had been Jewish.
Glancing quickly at his companion, Benny said, “Some were, most weren’t.”
“What motivated them to work for Israel?”
“Not all of them knew they were working for Israel. We used false flags when we thought it would get results. What motivated them? Money. Resentment for personal slights, real or imagined. Boredom.”
“Not ideology?”
“There must have been individuals who defected for ideological reasons but I personally never came across any. The thing they all had in common was they wanted to be treated as human beings, as opposed to cogs in a machine, and they were ready to risk their lives for the handler who understood this. The most remarkable thing about the Soviet Union was that nobody—nobody—believed in communism. Which meant that once you recruited a Russian, he made an outstanding spy for the simple reason that he’d been raised in a society where everyone, from the Politburo members on down to the Intourist guides, dissembled in order to survive. When a Russian agreed to spy for you, in a very real sense he’d already been trained to lead two lives.”
“You mean three lives, don’t you? One where he outwardly conforms to the Soviet system. The second where he despises the system and cuts corners to get ahead within it. The third where he betrays the system and spies for you.”
“Three lives it is.” Benny became pensive. “Which, when you think of it, may be par for the course. When you come right down to it, all men and some women live with an assortment of legends that blur at the edges where they overlap. Some of these IDs fade as we get older; others, curiously, become sharper and we spend more time in them. But that’s another story.”
“Consider the possibility that it isn’t another story … Is Benny Sapir the last of your legends or the one your parents gave you?”
Instead of answering, Benny sniffed at the air, which was growing chillier as the car climbed into the hills. Martin kicked himself for having asked. He grasped what professional interrogators took for granted: Each time you posed a question, you revealed what you didn’t know. If you weren’t careful, the person being interrogated could wind up knowing more about you than you did about him.
Benny delicately changed the subject. “Does your leg give you trouble these days?”
“I got used to the pain.”
A grimace appeared on Benny’s prize-fighter’s lips that looked as if they had been in one fight too many. “Yes, pain is like the buzzing in an ear—it’s something you learn to live with.”
As Benny shifted into second and turned onto a narrow road that climbed steeply, the small talk gave way to a comfortable silence that exists between two veteran warriors who have nothing to prove to each other. Benny had the car radio on and tuned to a classical music station. Suddenly the program was interrupted and Benny reached to turn up the volume. The announcer delivered a bulletin of news. When the music came back on, Benny lowered the volume.
“There was another pigu’a,” he informed Martin. “That’s a terrorist attack. Hezbollah in the Lebanon ambushed an army patrol in the security corridor we occupy along the border. Two of our boys were killed, two wounded.” He shook his head in disgust. “Hezbollah makes the mistake of thinking that we’re all hanging out in Tel Aviv nightclubs or raking in millions in our Israeli Silicon Valley, that prosperity has drained the fight out of us, that we’ve grown soft and fat and are not willing to die for our country. One of these days we’ll have to set them straight …”
The outburst took Martin by surprise. Not knowing how to respond, he said, “Uh-huh.”
Twenty-five minutes after picking Martin up near the shouk, Benny drove into what looked like a rich man’s housing project filled with expensive two-story homes set back from the street. “We’re a kilometer inside the West Bank here,” he noted as he eased the Skoda to the curb in front of a house with a wraparound porch. Martin followed him through the metal gate and along the porch to the back of the house, where Benny pointed out the low clouds in the distance drenched with saffron light. “It’s Jerusalem, over the horizon, that’s illuminating the clouds,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“No,” Martin shot back; the word escaped his lips before he knew what he was going to say. When Benny looked quickly at him, Martin added, “It makes me uneasy.”
Benny asked, “What makes you uneasy—cities beyond the horizon? Clouds saturated with light? My living on the Palestinian side of the sixty-seven border?”
Martin said, “All of the above.”
Benny shrugged. “I built this house in 1986, when Har Addar was founded,” he said. “None of us who came to live here imagined we would ever give this land back to the Palestinians.”
“Living on the wrong side of the green line must be something of an embarrassment for you.”
Benny punched a code into a tiny number pad fixed on the wall to turn off the alarm. “If and when we agree to the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said, “we’ll have to adjust the frontier to take into account Israeli communities like this one.” He unlocked the door and let himself into the house. The lights came on the instant he crossed the threshold. “Modern gadgets,” he explained with a snigger. “The alarm, the automated lights are Mossad perks—they supply them to all their senior people.”
Benny set out a bottle of imported whiskey and two thick kitchen glasses on a low glass table, along with a plastic bowl filled with ice cubes and another with pretzels. They both scraped over chairs and helped themselves to a stiff drink. Martin produced a Beedie from a tin box. Benny provided a light.
“To you and yours,” Martin said, exhaling smoke, reaching to clink glasses with the Israeli.
“To legends,” Benny shot back. “To the day when they become war surplus.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Martin declared.
Martin glanced around, taking in the framed Hockney prints over the sofa, the brass menorah on the sideboard, the three blown-up photographs, each bordered in black, of young men in army uniforms on the wall over the chimney. Benny noticed him noticing. “The two on the left were childhood friends. They were both killed in action on the Golan, one in sixty-seven, the other in seventy-three. The one on the right is our son, Daniel. He was killed in an ambush in the Lebanon a year and a half ago. Roadside bomb hidden in a dead dog blew up as his jeep went past. His mother … my wife died of grief five months later.”
Now Martin understood the source of the pain that Benny had learned to live with, and why he had grown melancholy. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.
“Me, also, I’m sorry,” was all Benny could trust himself to answer.
They both concentrated on their drinks. Finally Benny broke the silence. “So what brings you to the Holy Land, Dante?”
“You were the Mossad’s Russian expert, Benny. Who the hell is Samat Ugor-Zhilov?”
“Why are you interested in him?”
“He ran off from Kiryat Arba without giving a divorce to his wife. She’s religious. Without a divorce she can’t remarry. Her sister, who lives in Brooklyn, hired me to find Samat and get him to give her the divorce.”
“To know who Samat is, you have to understand where he was coming from.” Benny treated himself to another shot of whiskey. “How much do you know about the disintegration of the Soviet Union?”
“I know what I read in the newspapers.”
“That’s a beginning. The USSR we knew and loathed imploded in 1991. In the years that followed the country became what I call a kleptocracy. Its political and economic institutions were infiltrated by organized crime. To get a handle on what happened, you need to understand that it was Russia’s criminals, as opposed to its politicians, who dismantled the communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union. And make no mistake about it, the Russian criminals were Neanderthals. In the early stages of the disintegration, when almost everything was up for grabs, the Italian mafia came sniffing around to see if they could get a piece of the action. You will have a better handle on the Russian mafia when you know that the Italians took one look around and went home; the Russians were simply too ruthless for them.”
Martin whistled softly. “Hard to believe anyone could be more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra.”
“When the Soviet Union collapsed,” Benny went on, “thousands of gangs surfaced. In the beginning they ran the usual rackets, they offered the usual protection—”
“What the Russians call a roof.”
“I see you’ve done your homework. The Russian word for roof is krysha. When two gangs offered their clients krysha, instead of the clients fighting each other if they had differences, the gangs did. The warfare spilled onto the streets in the early nineties. The period is referred to as the Great Moscow Mob Wars. There were something in the neighborhood of thirty thousand murders in 1993 alone. Another thirty thousand people simply disappeared. The smarter gangsters bought into legitimate businesses; the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs once estimated that half of all private businesses or state-owned companies, and almost all of the banks in the country, had links to organized crime. The infamous Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, known as the Oligarkh since he appeared on the cover of Time, began life as a small time hoodlum. When he couldn’t bribe his way out of one particularly messy muddle, he wound up serving eight years in a gulag camp. When he finally returned to his native Armenia, Gorbachev was on the scene and the Soviet Union was breaking apart at the seams. Working out of a cramped communal apartment in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Ugor-Zhilov started offering krysha. Soon he was running his own small bank and his krysha clients were made to understand that they would be smart to use its services. At some point the Oligarkh branched out and bought into the used-car business in Yerevan. But being a big fish in a small pond didn’t satisfy him, so he set his sights on Moscow—he moved to the capital and in a matter of months became the kingpin of the used-car business there.”
“I heard all about his cornering the used-car market in Moscow. He bought out his competitors. The ones who wouldn’t be bought out wound up in the Moscow River wearing cement shoes.”
“The used-car racket was the tip of the iceberg. Look, Dante, you put your life on the line for Israel once and I’m going to return the favor. What I’m about to tell you isn’t public knowledge—even the Sixth Chief Directorate of the KGB, which was supposed to be keeping tabs on the Oligarkh, didn’t know it. For Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, the used-car dealerships were merely a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Russia happens to be the world’s second largest producer of aluminum. When the Soviet system collapsed, Ugor-Zhilov branched out into the aluminum business. He somehow raised seed money—I’m talking billions; his used-car dealerships were bringing in cash but not that much and to this day it’s a mystery where he got the money—and used it to make lucrative deals with smelters. He did all this through a holding company in which he was a silent partner. He bought three hundred railroad freight cars and built a port facility in Siberia to offload alumina, the bauxite extract that’s the principal ingredient in aluminum. He imported the bauxite tax free from Australia, processed it at the smelters into aluminum and exported it, tax free, abroad. His profits soared. In the West aluminum brought five dollars a ton profit, in Russia it brought two hundred dollars a ton profit to the people who exported it. By the early nineties, as Yeltsin’s privatization swept across the Soviet republics in an attempt to transform Russia into a market economy, the Oligarkh presided over a secret empire with the vast profits from aluminum at its base. His holding company expanded into other raw materials—steel, chrome, coal—and eventually bought into factories and businesses by the hundreds. He opened banks to service the empire and launder its profits abroad. Naturally he kept the skids greased with kickbacks to people in high places. At one point there were rumors that he’d paid off Yeltsin himself, but we were never able to pin this down.”
“Did the CIA’s Soviet division people know about this?”
“We were the ones with assets in Moscow. We shared enough of the take with them to convince them we were sharing all of it.”
The phone rang. Benny raised it to his ear and listened. Then: “As a matter of fact, he is … He’s doing what he was doing at Kiryat Arba, trying to pick up the trail of Samat Ugor-Zhilov so his wife can get a divorce … Actually, I do believe him, yes. Let’s not forget that Dante Pippen is one of the good guys … Shalom, shalom.”
When Benny had hung up, Martin said, “Thanks for that.”
“If I didn’t believe it, you wouldn’t be sitting here. Where was I? Okay. A certain number of Russian mafiosi were Jewish. When the mob wars broke out in Moscow in 1993, Israel became a safe haven for some of them. Here they were far away from the day to day mayhem. Even some of the gangsters who weren’t Jewish came to Israel under our Law of Return—they concocted new identities claiming a Jewish mother or a Jewish grandmother and slipped into Israel along with the seven hundred and fifty thousand Russian Jews who came here in the nineties. As new immigrants, the gangsters were able to bring in large sums of money without anybody asking where it came from. When our Shabak people finally wised up to the danger, we tapped their phones, we infiltrated their entourages, all the time looking for evidence that the Russians were engaged in criminal activities here. But they were careful to keep a low profile. They didn’t spit where they ate, as the saying goes. We used to joke that they wouldn’t cross an intersection on a yellow light. Using Israeli banks as conduits, they continued their illegal activities, but always abroad. They smuggled uranium yellow cake out of Nigeria and sold it to the highest bidder. They bought into the diamond business, smuggling uncut stones out of Russia to Amsterdam. They could get you a diesel submarine in mint condition for a mere five-and-a-half million dollars, not counting a crew of Baltic sailors to run it—that was extra. They sold Soviet surplus tanks with or without ammunition, jeeps, half-tracks, portable bridges to cross rivers, anti-aircraft missiles, radars of all sizes and shapes. Payments had to be in U.S. or Swiss currency deposited in numbered accounts in Geneva, delivery guaranteed within thirty days of the payment being received. All contracts were concluded with corporate affiliates in Liechtenstein.”
“Why Liechtenstein?”
Benny bared his teeth. “They have strict banking secrecy laws.”
“Uh-huh.”
“The Oligarkh’s brother was one of those who immigrated to Israel. His name was Akim Ugor-Zhilov. One fine day in 1993 he turned up at Ben-Gurion airport with a wife and three young children in tow, claiming that he had a Jewish grandmother and had, in any case, converted to Judaism; naturally he had affidavits to prove all this. He has a livid scar over one eye. Claims he was wounded in Afghanistan, though there is no evidence he ever served in the Soviet army. He installed himself in a heavily guarded villa in Caesarea surrounded by a high electrified wall and staffed by Armenians who served in the army and knew how to use weapons. The Russian speakers in the Mossad called them chelovek nastroeniia—“moody people.” One minute Akim would scream insults at the Armenians who worked for him, the next he would be purring like a cat and bragging about his business prowess. Besides the fortress in Caesarea, he has a duplex in London’s Cadogan Place and a house on the Grande Corniche above Nice.”
“How did he make ends meet in Israel?”
“He brought in something like fifty million dollars over the years and invested it in government bonds, which earn six or seven percent interest, tax free. He also has a piece of a newspaper delivery service, a hotel in Eilat, half a dozen gas stations around Haifa.”
“Where does Samat fit into this picture?”
“Akim and Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov are brothers. It turns out there was a third brother, name of Zurab. He was a medical doctor, a member of the Armenian Communist Party and married to a Jewish woman. When Tzvetan was convicted of shaking down local merchants and sent to Siberia, his brother Zurab was arrested as an enemy of the people—under the Soviet system relatives of criminals usually suffered the same fate as the criminal. Zurab wound up in a Siberian gulag and died there of scarlet fever.”
“What happened to Zurab’s wife?”
“After the arrest of her husband, we lost all trace of her. She vanished from the face of the earth. The two brothers, Tzvetan and Zurab, had been very close, which explains, in part at least, why Tzvetan loathed the Soviet system: He blamed the communists for his brother’s death. Zurab left behind him a son named Samat.”
“Which makes Samat the Oligarkh’s and Akim’s nephew.”
“Samat was taken under uncle Tzvetan’s wing when he returned from Siberia; the Oligarkh, who had no children of his own, became a surrogate father to him. In the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and especially after Gorbachev came on the scene, the fact that Samat’s father had died in Siberia counted for him instead of against him. Samat was admitted to the elite Forestry Institute, the not-so-secret home of the Soviet space program, where he studied computer science. Later he earned a doctorate from the State Planning Agency’s Higher Economic School. His computer skills must have attracted the attention of the KGB because the next thing we know he was working for the Sixth Chief Directorate, where he learned all there was to know about money laundering schemes and off-shore banks. When the Oligarkh, offering krysha and starting out in the used-car business in Armenia, decided to go into the banking business to service his expanding empire, he turned to his nephew Samat quit the KGB and opened the first bank for Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov in Yerevan. And it was Samat, with a reputation of something of a genius when it came to juggling accounts and obscuring currency trails, who created the money laundering scheme under which dozens of millions of dollars were siphoned off abroad and then squirreled away in off-shore banks and shell holding companies. The Oligarkh’s holding companies are rumored to have financial interests in a Spanish insurance company, a French hotel chain, a Swiss real estate consortium, a German movie theater chain. Thanks to Samat’s sleight of hand, the threads that linked these accounts were untraceable—God knows our people tried. So for that matter did your CIA. Samat’s impenetrable labyrinth of banks stretches from France to Germany to Monaco to Liechtenstein to Switzerland to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, not to mention Vanuatu in the South Pacific, the Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Prague, Western Samoa—all of them suspected of being involved in laundering the Oligarkh’s considerable riches. He eventually opened bank accounts in North America, where a third of his empire’s aluminum was marketed. There were shells within shells within shells. Working out of the Oligarkh’s isolated dacha in a village half an hour from Moscow along the Moscow-Petersburg highway, Samat was constantly shifting assets from one shell to another. Wire transfers between banks, some of which consist of nothing more than a single room and a computer on some remote island, are the easiest way to move large amounts of money—one billion in one-hundred-dollar bills weighs something like eleven tons. And it was said that the Oligarkh’s banker never committed anything to paper; the entire structure of his uncle’s off-shore holdings was in his head.”
“Which was why it became urgent to get him out of Russia when the mob war heated up,” Martin guessed.
“Precisely. We didn’t figure out the connection between Samat and the second of his two uncles, Akim, until one of our teams watching Akim’s villa at Caesarea caught them on film—Akim emerged from the villa and embraced Samat as he got out of his Honda, at which point we started looking into the identity of this new immigrant who had paid in cash when he bought a split-level home in Kiryat Arba.”
Benny offered Martin a refill and, when he shook his head no, he poured himself a short one and downed it in one gulp. It was almost as if the recounting of the story had sapped his energy.
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 not 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.”
“The plot thickens!”
“We knew the CIA didn’t want me to find Samat—my old boss told me as much when she invited me down to the Chinese restaurant.” Martin thought about the exploding honey that had killed Minh and the two bullets that a sniper had shot at him in Hebron. He led Stella to one of the rows of plastic seats out of earshot of other passengers. “How did things go with your sister after I left?”
“She tried to talk me into staying in Israel. What would I do here?”
Martin said, “Israel is also a pressure cooker—you could go around telling anti-Israeli jokes for a living.”
“Very funny. As a matter of fact I know a good one. The rabbi told it to me. Question: What is anti-Semitism? Answer: Hating Jews more than necessary.”
“That’s not funny,” Martin said.
“What’s funny about it,” Stella insisted angrily, “is that it’s not funny. I could kick myself for trying to make someone without a sense of humor laugh.”
“My pal Dante had a sense of humor,” Martin said, a faraway look in his eyes. “He left it in a room over a bar in Beirut.”
Stella decided to change the subject. “Samat’s uncle sounds like a real Russian mobster.”
“I thought he could give me an idea where to start looking for Samat. He said if he knew where to look he wouldn’t need me.”
“Do you think Samat really ran off with all that money? What will his uncle do if he catches up with him?”
A voice over the public address system announced that the flight to London was about to start boarding. Martin climbed to his feet. “What will he do to him? I suppose he’ll tickle him to death.”
Stella said, “You’re stepping out of character and telling a joke.” Squinting, she studied Martin’s face. “Okay, you’re not telling a joke.” Around them passengers were collecting their hand luggage and starting to head toward the stairs leading to the boarding gate. “I wish I were going with you. I’m getting used to your sense of humor.”
“I thought you said I didn’t have one.”
“That’s the part I’m getting used to.” She stood and grazed his elbow with the back of her hand. “I hope against hope you’ll call me from London.”
His eyes took in the triangle of pale skin on her chest. “I admire your ability to hope against hope.”
She toyed nervously with the first button on her shirt that was buttoned. “Maybe I can infect you.”
“Not likely. I’ve been inoculated.”
“Inoculations wear off.” She stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Bye for now, Martin Odum.”
“Uh-huh. Bye.”
Crystal Quest was in wrathful dudgeon. “There’s only one thing more revolting than having to target one of your own,” she declared to the wallahs scattered around her sanctum, “and that’s bungling the hit. Where do we hire marksmen these days, will somebody kindly enlighten me. Coney Island popgun concessions where you win a plastic doll if you topple the clown into the pan filled with dish water? Oh my God, it’s pathetic. Pa-the-tic.”
“We should have given the assignment to Lincoln Dittmann,” one of the newer wallahs suggested. “I understand he’s a crackerjack shot—”
Quest, her head angled, her eyes unblinking, gazed at the speaker as if he just might have come up with the solution to their problem. “Where did you pick up that nugget of information?” she inquired in a husky whisper, humoring the wallah before decapitating him.
The young man sensed that he had ventured onto quicksand. “I was reading into the Central Registry 201 files to get a handle on our assets in the field …” His voice faltered. He looked around for a buoy but no one seemed interested in throwing him one.
Quest’s mouth sagged open as her skull bobbed up and down in wonderment. “Lincoln Dittmann! Now there’s an idea whose time has come. Ha! Will somebody put the neophyte here out of his misery.”
Quest’s chief of staff, a thick skinned timeserver who had weathered his share of storms in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick, said very evenly, “Dittmann and Odum are one and the same individual, Frank. You would have seen that they were cross-referenced in the 201 files if you’d read the fine print on the first page.”
“That’s strike one,” Quest informed Frank. “If you read the fine print on your employment contract, you’ll see that we operate by the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule in the DDO.” She swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees in her chair as if she were winding herself up. “Okay. I’ll recapitulate,” she said, stifling her irritation. “We made an honest effort to talk Martin Odum out of walking back the cat on Samat Ugor-Zhilov. Martin’s a consenting adult. He’s doing what he has to do. And we’re going to do what we have to do to make sure he never catches up to the Samat in question. This is a priority matter, which means it gets our full and undivided attention. Where did Martin Odum go when he left Israel? What leads is he following? Who is he planning to talk to? And what resources do we have on the ground—what resources can we throw into the theater of eventual operations—to make sure I get to wear my sackcloth and ashes before this thing blows up in our faces?”