Legends

“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.