“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?”
Instead of answering, Benny sniffed at the air, which was growing chillier as the car climbed into the hills. Martin kicked himself for having asked. He grasped what professional interrogators took for granted: Each time you posed a question, you revealed what you didn’t know. If you weren’t careful, the person being interrogated could wind up knowing more about you than you did about him.
Benny delicately changed the subject. “Does your leg give you trouble these days?”
“I got used to the pain.”
A grimace appeared on Benny’s prize-fighter’s lips that looked as if they had been in one fight too many. “Yes, pain is like the buzzing in an ear—it’s something you learn to live with.”
As Benny shifted into second and turned onto a narrow road that climbed steeply, the small talk gave way to a comfortable silence that exists between two veteran warriors who have nothing to prove to each other. Benny had the car radio on and tuned to a classical music station. Suddenly the program was interrupted and Benny reached to turn up the volume. The announcer delivered a bulletin of news. When the music came back on, Benny lowered the volume.
“There was another pigu’a,” he informed Martin. “That’s a terrorist attack. Hezbollah in the Lebanon ambushed an army patrol in the security corridor we occupy along the border. Two of our boys were killed, two wounded.” He shook his head in disgust. “Hezbollah makes the mistake of thinking that we’re all hanging out in Tel Aviv nightclubs or raking in millions in our Israeli Silicon Valley, that prosperity has drained the fight out of us, that we’ve grown soft and fat and are not willing to die for our country. One of these days we’ll have to set them straight …”
The outburst took Martin by surprise. Not knowing how to respond, he said, “Uh-huh.”
Twenty-five minutes after picking Martin up near the shouk, Benny drove into what looked like a rich man’s housing project filled with expensive two-story homes set back from the street. “We’re a kilometer inside the West Bank here,” he noted as he eased the Skoda to the curb in front of a house with a wraparound porch. Martin followed him through the metal gate and along the porch to the back of the house, where Benny pointed out the low clouds in the distance drenched with saffron light. “It’s Jerusalem, over the horizon, that’s illuminating the clouds,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“No,” Martin shot back; the word escaped his lips before he knew what he was going to say. When Benny looked quickly at him, Martin added, “It makes me uneasy.”
Benny asked, “What makes you uneasy—cities beyond the horizon? Clouds saturated with light? My living on the Palestinian side of the sixty-seven border?”
Martin said, “All of the above.”
Benny shrugged. “I built this house in 1986, when Har Addar was founded,” he said. “None of us who came to live here imagined we would ever give this land back to the Palestinians.”
“Living on the wrong side of the green line must be something of an embarrassment for you.”
Benny punched a code into a tiny number pad fixed on the wall to turn off the alarm. “If and when we agree to the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said, “we’ll have to adjust the frontier to take into account Israeli communities like this one.” He unlocked the door and let himself into the house. The lights came on the instant he crossed the threshold. “Modern gadgets,” he explained with a snigger. “The alarm, the automated lights are Mossad perks—they supply them to all their senior people.”
Benny set out a bottle of imported whiskey and two thick kitchen glasses on a low glass table, along with a plastic bowl filled with ice cubes and another with pretzels. They both scraped over chairs and helped themselves to a stiff drink. Martin produced a Beedie from a tin box. Benny provided a light.
“To you and yours,” Martin said, exhaling smoke, reaching to clink glasses with the Israeli.
“To legends,” Benny shot back. “To the day when they become war surplus.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Martin declared.
Martin glanced around, taking in the framed Hockney prints over the sofa, the brass menorah on the sideboard, the three blown-up photographs, each bordered in black, of young men in army uniforms on the wall over the chimney. Benny noticed him noticing. “The two on the left were childhood friends. They were both killed in action on the Golan, one in sixty-seven, the other in seventy-three. The one on the right is our son, Daniel. He was killed in an ambush in the Lebanon a year and a half ago. Roadside bomb hidden in a dead dog blew up as his jeep went past. His mother … my wife died of grief five months later.”
Now Martin understood the source of the pain that Benny had learned to live with, and why he had grown melancholy. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.
“Me, also, I’m sorry,” was all Benny could trust himself to answer.
They both concentrated on their drinks. Finally Benny broke the silence. “So what brings you to the Holy Land, Dante?”
“You were the Mossad’s Russian expert, Benny. Who the hell is Samat Ugor-Zhilov?”
“Why are you interested in him?”
“He ran off from Kiryat Arba without giving a divorce to his wife. She’s religious. Without a divorce she can’t remarry. Her sister, who lives in Brooklyn, hired me to find Samat and get him to give her the divorce.”
“To know who Samat is, you have to understand where he was coming from.” Benny treated himself to another shot of whiskey. “How much do you know about the disintegration of the Soviet Union?”
“I know what I read in the newspapers.”
“That’s a beginning. The USSR we knew and loathed imploded in 1991. In the years that followed the country became what I call a kleptocracy. Its political and economic institutions were infiltrated by organized crime. To get a handle on what happened, you need to understand that it was Russia’s criminals, as opposed to its politicians, who dismantled the communist superstructure of the former Soviet Union. And make no mistake about it, the Russian criminals were Neanderthals. In the early stages of the disintegration, when almost everything was up for grabs, the Italian mafia came sniffing around to see if they could get a piece of the action. You will have a better handle on the Russian mafia when you know that the Italians took one look around and went home; the Russians were simply too ruthless for them.”
Martin whistled softly. “Hard to believe anyone could be more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra.”
“When the Soviet Union collapsed,” Benny went on, “thousands of gangs surfaced. In the beginning they ran the usual rackets, they offered the usual protection—”
“What the Russians call a roof.”
“I see you’ve done your homework. The Russian word for roof is krysha. When two gangs offered their clients krysha, instead of the clients fighting each other if they had differences, the gangs did. The warfare spilled onto the streets in the early nineties. The period is referred to as the Great Moscow Mob Wars. There were something in the neighborhood of thirty thousand murders in 1993 alone. Another thirty thousand people simply disappeared. The smarter gangsters bought into legitimate businesses; the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs once estimated that half of all private businesses or state-owned companies, and almost all of the banks in the country, had links to organized crime. The infamous Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, known as the Oligarkh since he appeared on the cover of Time, began life as a small time hoodlum. When he couldn’t bribe his way out of one particularly messy muddle, he wound up serving eight years in a gulag camp. When he finally returned to his native Armenia, Gorbachev was on the scene and the Soviet Union was breaking apart at the seams. Working out of a cramped communal apartment in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Ugor-Zhilov started offering krysha. Soon he was running his own small bank and his krysha clients were made to understand that they would be smart to use its services. At some point the Oligarkh branched out and bought into the used-car business in Yerevan. But being a big fish in a small pond didn’t satisfy him, so he set his sights on Moscow—he moved to the capital and in a matter of months became the kingpin of the used-car business there.”