Legends

Dr. al-Karim looked Dante in the eye. “Why, you, Mr. Pippen, are the distant enemy. You and your American civilization which considers smoking dangerous for the health while everything else—extramarital sex, pornography, carnal secularism, materialism—is permissible. The Isra’ilis are an outpost of your corrupt civilization. The Jews are your surrogates, dispatched to steal our land and colonize our countries and demoralize our souls and humiliate our religion. When we have defeated them we will turn our attention to the ultimate enemy.”

“I can see how you might attack what you call the near enemy,” Dante replied. “But how will you war against a distant enemy who can obliterate you the way he would a mosquito caught in flagrante delicto on the back of his wrist?”

The imam sat back in his chair, a knowing smile flickering on his pudgy face. “We will use the vast amounts of money we earn from selling you petrol for your gas-guzzling cars to hire the talents of people like you, Mr. Pippen. American heads are already poisoned by Hollywood films and glossy magazines such as Playboy or Hustler. We will poison their bodies. We will hijack their planes and crash them into their buildings. We will construct, with your help, the poor man’s bomb—valises filled with germs or chemicals—and explode it in their cities.”

Dante reached for the glass of mint tea and touched his lips to it. “I’d best be immigrating back to Ireland, then,” he said lightly.

“I can see that you do not take what I say seriously. No matter.” The imam pushed back his sleeve, glanced at his wristwatch and rose to his feet. “You will sleep fitfully tonight as you turn over in your mind what I have told you. Questions will occur to you. I invite you to come back tomorrow and pose them, Mr. Pippen. God willing, we will pick up the conversation where we left it off.”

Dante stood up. “Yes. I will return. Thank you.”

In the days that followed, Dante used what Abdullah had brought from Beirut to show his students how to assemble remote control detonators and set off explosive charges in the quarry from the top of the nearby hill. When Dr. al-Karim’s people supplied the first molded rock made out of plaster of paris, Dante filled it with PETN and rigged a remote detonator. The students set the molded rock down at the side of the road and tethered a lame goat ten meters from it. Then everyone trooped up the hill. The imam himself, hearing of the experiment, showed up at the lip of the quarry to watch. Dante waved to him and Dr. al-Karim, surrounded by four bodyguards, raised a palm in salute. One of the young fedayeen wired the small transmitter to a car battery. Everyone turned to stare at the goat at the bottom of the quarry. “Okay, Abdullah,” Dante said. “Let her rip.” Reaching for the small radio, Abdullah rotated the switch until there was an audible click and then depressed it. Far below, in the quarry, a dry cough of a blast stirred up a swell of dust. When it cleared, the goat had vanished. Where it had stood, the ground was saturated with blood and entrails.

“God is great,” Abdullah murmured.

“PETN is greater,” Dante remarked.

When Dante entered the imam’s study that afternoon, Dr. al-Karim came bounding around the desk to congratulate him. “You have earned your wages, Mr. Pippen,” he said, throwing a pulpy arm over Dante’s shoulder. “My fighters are eager to use your remote control device against the Jews.”

The two settled onto kitchen chairs. Dr. al-Karim produced his jade beads and began threading them through his fingers with great dexterity as Dante explained that he needed another ten days, no more, no less, to make the imam’s fedayeen ready for combat.

“We have waited this long,” the imam said. “Another ten days will not inconvenience us.”

The conversation drifted on to the two-year-old Syrian occupation of parts of Lebanon; the month before Dante’s arrival, Damascus had installed surface-to-air missiles in the Bekaa, a move that Hezbollah did not appreciate since it was bound to attract Isra’ili attention to the valley. Dr. al-Karim wanted to know whether President Bush would put pressure on the Isra’ilis to pull back from the buffer zone in southern Lebanon. Dante said he was far from being an expert in such matters, but he doubted it. He, in turn, wondered whether the Iranians would put pressure on the Syrians to end their virtual occupation of Lebanon now that the civil war had quieted down. The imam replied that the death the week before of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had created a vacuum in the Islamic world and predicted that it would be a long time before the Shiites found someone with enough charisma to take his place. Dante asked jokingly if the imam aspired to the job. Dr. al-Karim took the question seriously. He stopped manipulating his worry beads and placed a finger along the side of a nostril. “I aspire to serve God and lead my people to victory over the Jews,” he said. “Nothing more.”