Legends

Martin, trailed by his three students and the translator, set off up the slope and went to ground behind the rusty wreck of a U.N. jeep. They didn’t have long to wait. The Isra’ili patrol, led by a soldier scanning the dirt road with a magnetic mine detector, appeared around the bend. The soldier searching for mines passed his metal detector over the dog and, getting no reading, continued on. The officer behind him came abreast of the dog. Something must have caught his eye—the crude stitches on the stomach, probably—because he crouched next to the animal to have a closer look. Martin nodded at the fedayeen holding the automatic pager that had been rigged to transmit a signal to the plastic receiver inside the dog’s stomach. Below, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it cleared, the Isra’ili officer was still crouching next to the dog but his head could be seen rolling slowly toward the shoulder of the road.

“Comes as news to me that honey can explode,” the Russian whispered, his thick Slavic accent surfacing indolently from the depths of his throat.

The sulfurous stench of the burnt beeswax reached Martin’s nostrils and he had trouble breathing. Gasping for air, he bolted upright in bed and blotted the cold sweat from his brow with a corner of the sheet. His heart was beating furiously; a migraine was pressing against the back of his eyeballs. For a terrible moment he didn’t know who he was or where he was. He solved the second problem first when he heard the hacking cough of the old man two rooms down the corridor of the boarding house and knew where he wasn’t: southern Lebanon. When he figured out which legend he was inhabiting, his breathing gradually returned to normal.

When his plane landed at Heathrow, four days before, Martin had breezed through passport control without a hitch. “Here on business or pleasure, is it?” the woman custom’s agent in the booth had asked. “With any luck, pleasure, in the form of licensed tabernacles and museums, and in that order,” he’d answered. The woman had flashed a jaded smile as she stamped him into the country. “If it’s pubs you’re looking for, you have come to the right corner of the world. Enjoy your stay in England.”

Collecting his valise from the baggage carousel, Martin had started following the signs marked “Underground” when a portly young man with a peaches-and-cream complexion had materialized in front of him. “Mr. Odum, is it?” he’d asked.

“How come you know my name?”

The young man, his body wrapped in a belted trench coat a size too large for him, had ignored Martin’s question. “Could I trouble you to come with me, sir,” he had said.

“Do I have a choice?”

“I’m afraid you don’t.”

“What are you, five or six?”

“MI5, thank you, kindly. Six thinks you’re radioactive, wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

Martin could see three other men in trench coats closing in on him as he limped behind the young man across the arrival hall and up a flight of steps to a balcony overlooking the hall. Peaches-and-cream stopped before an opaque glass door with the word “Perishables” stencilled on it. He rapped on the glass twice with his knuckles, opened the door and politely stepped aside. Inside, a middle-aged woman dressed in a man’s pinstriped suit and tie was busy calling up file folders on a computer terminal. Without looking up, she inclined her head toward an inner door with the words “Supervisor, Perishables” stencilled on the glass. In the inner office, Martin discovered a black man with a shaven head studying the baggage carousels below through the slats of a partly closed venetian blind. The black man swiveled around in his seat and sank back into it. “I’ll admit it, you don’t look like your average serial killer to me,” he said in a soft purr.

“What does an average serial killer look like?”

“Glassy stare as he avoids your eye, bitten finger nails, mouth drooping open, saliva drooling down the stubble of his chin. Bela Lugosi sort of role.”

“Are you a cop or a movie critic?”

Snickering at Martin’s question, the Supervisor, Perishables began reading from a yellowing index card. “Last trace we had on you, you were a bloke with two incarnations. In the first, you were Pippen, Dante, an Irishman who declined to help us with our inquiries after the IRA blew open a bus in central London. In the second, you were Dittmann, Lincoln, an American arms merchant peddling his wares to the highest bidder in the Triple Border area of Latin America.”

Martin said, “Case of mistaken identity. You’re confusing me with the antiheroes of B films.”

“Don’t think we are,” the Supervisor, Perishables allowed. He arched his brows and took a long look at Martin, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “If we had chairs, I’d invite you to rest your arse on one of them. Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Been sitting from Tel Aviv to here,” Martin said. “Glad to stretch my legs.”