Legends

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?”