Dusting the dirt off of his sabbath suit, the rabbi came up to Martin. “You okay?” he asked breathlessly.
Martin nodded.
“That was too close for comfort,” Ben Zion said, his chest heaving with excitement. “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were shooting at you, Mr. Odum.”
“Now why would they want to do that?” Martin asked innocently. “I’m not even Jewish. I’m just a visitor who will soon go back to the safety of his country, his city, his home.”
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.”