“Is this anyone you recognize?” Dov asked.
“I can’t say,” Scobie answered. “I think no. No, probably not.”
“What about these passport photos? Even seen this person?”
“These persons, you mean.”
“No, they’re all the same person.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I see that now. Really. Quite. Alright, let me look.”
Scobie sifted through the photos.
“No. No. No, none of these photos ring a bell. I’m so sorry.”
“Take a look at the body again.”
“All those burn marks don’t help. And would you look at those hands! Good God! Was it the fire burned his fingernails off?”
“Look more closely at his face, please.”
“Yes, yes, I’m looking.”
“Do you recognize him?”
“Vaguely. Yes, a little bit, now you that you mention it.”
Dov gave him a name.
“No, I’ve never known any such person.”
Dov gave him second name.
“No.”
And then another.
“What’s that you say? What? Oh, my God! Oh, why, yes! Yes, of course it is! It’s him! It’s most definitely him! My God, what’s happened to my brain? Too many bloody Pimm’s Cups, I’m afraid. Oh, well they finally got him, did they? Too bad. Brave bugger.”
What Scobie had just confirmed was that the dead man thought at first to be Joseph Temescu was in fact an American clandestine agent referred to in some quarters of the world as “legendary,” while in others as “the agent from hell.”
Paul Dimiter.
Zui looked down at the folder. He was still skeptical. Dimiter had entered the country surreptitiously. And so how could his intent have been innocent? Especially an agent so notorious, so invincibly lethal that there lingered among the world’s intelligence community the persistent rumor and belief that the charismatic Viet Cong leader, Ho Chi Minh, didn’t die a normal death in his bed from heart failure as had been put out by the North Vietnamese, but in fact had been the victim of a hit by Dimiter while attending a banquet in Albania where Ho was in meetings with the Albanian leadership and Soviet military officials. Having been in deep cover, ran the rumor, the agent had infiltrated the kitchen and dining room staff of the Hotel Dajti in Tirana and on the night of the banquet rubbed a deadly and slow-acting poison on the inside surface of a wooden salad bowl, which he then set down in front of Ho. Albanian security men hovered at the scene both in the kitchen and the banquet hall all through the dinner. Although not to any noticeable avail. On the plane flying back to Hanoi, Ho experienced a minor stomach disorder and then six days later was dead, an event for which the North Vietnamese blamed the Russians. Zui wondered if some reference to the exploit, however oblique, would be found in the pages now before him, although he expected it would not.
Nor was it. Nor, to Zui’s frustration, was there anything else in the folder’s contents that did not go directly to making the case that the CIA had nothing to do with, nor even any knowledge of, Dimiter’s presence in Israel. Almost everything else was either missing or redacted. Even Dimiter’s age was not noted. Shaking his head, Zui combed the pages for whatever there was: World War II O.S.S. combat officer 1941 to 1945, and then immediately recruited by the CIA and assigned to Clandestine Services; Special Training (unspecified) in 1946; various missions; unspecified service in Vietnam in the sixties at which time, during the earliest days of the war, he received paramedical training while aboard a Swedish prisoner exchange ship; secret (and against regulations) marriage to another agent, who later, along with an agent whom Dimiter had trained, met her death while on a covert mission led by her husband in 1972. A deep depression followed. And then in 1973 he completed a second and highly unusual mission in Albania. Zui frowned. The next two pages were completely redacted and the body of the main report at an end. An appendix was attached. It was Dimiter’s final report on the mission that had ended in the death of his wife and agent Stephen Riley, a handsome trained killer, biochemist, and explosives expert.
Dimiter’s wife, an experienced pilot, had flown the trio to a narrow and well hidden dale on the outskirts of Dolacio, a small city in the Los Lagos district of Chile that had always attracted strong German immigration. The target of the hunt was Erik Klar, a German scientist who had invented and sold to the United States government the working plans for a new technology giving military aircraft the ability to completely escape radar detection. But then a fully confirmed report came through that Klar had just duplicitously offered the Soviets a countertechnology that nullified the radar defeater. Finding Klar in a house very close to a number of low-rise apartment buildings, the agents, after killing both of Klar’s bodyguards, forced him to give up the location and combination of a safe in a nearby building that Klar said contained all the plans and schematics for the counterdevice. While his wife went with Riley with instructions to retrieve them and place them in one or, if necessary, both of the two black valises that Riley all along had been in charge of, and then to go directly back to the plane, Dimiter stayed behind to kill Klar, for the plans for his device were still in a head where there also resided a treacherous intent. Dimiter broke his neck. Next, he made a thorough search of the house in case Klar had been lying and the plans were really here, or perhaps a second set of them made as a protection against loss of the first. Finding nothing, Dimiter set about obtaining the proof that the man he had killed was indeed Erik Klar. First he wrapped adhesive tape around his own forefinger. Next, he wrapped a second piece of tape around Klar’s, then pressed firmly, removed it, and then carefully wrapped it around and on top of the tape on his own forefinger, thus concealing and protecting Klar’s fingerprint. Just as Dimiter had finished this procedure, the blast of a tremendous explosion shook the house. Dimiter raced out into the street, or so read his report, to see a nearby apartment building crumbling to the ground in a titanic shroud of soaring flame.
It was the building in which Klar had said the plans were stored.
There were shouts and screams, although not from the building. It was impossible for anyone to have survived. But Dimiter waited. Agonized. Watching. And passionately hoping that he was mistaken, that this wasn’t the building that Riley and his wife had been told contained the plans, or that they’d retrieved them so very quickly they were out of the building before the explosion and were patiently waiting for him back at the plane.
They were not.
Two photos were attached to the file, each with a name imprinted at the bottom. One photo was of Riley, a tall and handsome redheaded man, while the other was of Dimiter’s wife, a pretty blonde with a look of innocence and a winsome school-girl smile.
There was no photo of Dimiter.
The name of his wife was Jean.
Zui turned back a few pages, scowled, and then closing the folder he slapped it down on the table and buzzed for Sandalls, who a few moments later hurried into the room with a document folder in hand and sat down across from Zui with a satisfied grin.
“And so what was this mission in Albania?” Zui asked. “It’s redacted.”
“Yeah, it’s sensitive.”
Sandalls held up the folder he’d come into the room with and handed it to Zui. “Here it is! the whole story! I’d hoped we’d have the clearance last night but it just came in. Read away. I think it’s going to ease all of your concerns.”
“What clearance?” Zui asked. “From who?”
“From the Vatican.”
“From the what?”
Sandalls shifted a gumdrop to the side of his mouth.
“It’s all there,” he said, indicating the folder while his other hand crushed up the gumdrop wrapper. He stood up and said, “Buzz me when you’re done.”
“I will.”
Zui waited until Sandalls had closed the door quietly behind him, and then he opened the folder and began to read with fascination the riveting report that it contained. In 1973, it was state
d, the Agency was secretly petitioned by the Vatican for help with a dire situation in Albania. As had happened in Mexico in the early part of the century, Catholic priests there had been killed, imprisoned, or deported and whenever the Vatican tried infiltrating a bishop with the power to ordain new priests, they were almost immediately caught. And killed. So now the Vatican asked the CIA for the services of one of their agents, one with the ability to evade capture and then to carry out the mission. If either born or baptized Catholic, he would be ordained—temporarily—a bishop.
Remarkably, the CIA granted their request, and based on his Albanian expertise, they gave the Vatican Dimiter, who then carried out the mission. But on returning to Rome to have his faculties revoked, he unexpectedly—and shockingly, according to some—retired from the the Central Intelligence Agency and vanished from the face of the earth. Answers had been sought, though never received, from a Cardinal Vittorio Ricci, Dimiter’s Vatican mentor and ordainer, who said he had no notion of Dimiter’s plans or of where he might be. The only light that he could shed on the agent’s state of mind was something Dimiter had told him on returning from Albania about a “mystical experience” that had occurred near the end of his Albanian mission, something that had shaken him profoundly but that either he would not, or could not, describe that now made it impossible for him to kill; an impulse, he told Ricci, that he had already felt coming on long before.
“It was after we had baptized and ordained him,” Ricci related. “I think somewhere near the start of mission. At least that’s what he told me. And then there’d been the death of his wife, you know. Sometimes suffering turns out to be the dirty window that at last allows grace to enter the heart. Oh, and yes! Yes, something else I recall now, now that I think of it: his remarking there was something that he needed to find out. A sort of mission, if you like. Not one of yours, though. No. Not one of those. Something else.”
Zui closed the folder, set it down and buzzed for Sandalls.
“Satisfied, Moshe?”
“Yes and no. It’s still a mystery, is it not? Why he was here?”
“I’ll grant you that. Yes, it is.”
Zui tilted up the folder to his gaze.
“So the guy was a freak,” he said.
“How?”
“Inability to feel pain, for one.’ ”
“Lucky boy.”
“Maybe not,” Zui remarked.
“Bell coming?”
“I don’t think so.”
“One on one, then, let me ask you something, Bill.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know this rumor about Dimiter killing Ho Chi Minh?”
“Yeah, it’s out there.”
“Did he really?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“You just did. You’re smiling.”
“I was looking at your tie.”
“Well, while you’re at it look at this.”
Zui had lifted out a page from the heavily redacted CIA folder.
“All these different kinds of looks in the passport photos. And yet no sign of plastic surgery scars. That’s what the Arabs call a ghaimetsayfiyyeh, ‘a tiny cloud of summer.’ ”
“I like the season, at least.”
“It’s still a cloud. How do we explain it? Maybe inserts, bits of sponge in the cheeks? Subcutaneous injections to darken his skin?”
“Could be that. Or maybe it was just something inside him made the difference. He was special. Very special. An extraordinary person.”
“Then you’ve met him?”
“No, I haven’t. Or maybe the correct thing to say is, ‘Who knows?’ ”
Zui let the slightest of smiles curve his lips. “Yes, and speaking of things not known . . .” He picked up the folder and held up its cover to Sandalls. “Here we’re given tons of tiny and irrelevant details, like his marksmanship scores, his love of classical music, and so on, or how a Cambodian former circus clown on some cockamamie prisoner exchange ship taught him how to juggle and put clown makeup on to keep the mice in the hold from being bored. And yet we’re not to be privileged to know his age? Place of birth?”
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, it isn’t in the file. Any file.”
“Bill, this is farce. I mean, really. Am I to assume the man landed here on the planet?”
“I am telling you the truth.”
“Do I get points for not quoting Pontius Pilate?” Zui opened the folder and started turning pages. “Oh, no, sorry. What he said isn’t here in the file.” He dropped the folder to the table with a splat.
“All this venom over a tie?”
Zui leaned back in his chair and smiled slightly.
“Oh, you’re good. And incidentally, you just said the secret word.”
“You mean tie?”
“No, venom. Who on earth would choose to die by the venom of a Deathstalker scorpion, Bill? They say the pain is horrific.”
Sandalls shrugged.
“Oh, well, who the hell knows. I’ve heard he was carrying a ton of guilt about his wife.”
“About his wife?”
“That’s what they say. Or rather ‘he.’ Our man at the Vatican. If Dimiter hadn’t broken the rules about marrieds not teaming together, she wouldn’t have died. Capiche? She wouldn’t have been on that mission.”
“And so?”
“And so maybe he just wanted to suffer.”
“Oh, so now we’re psychiatrists, Sandalls?”
“Come on, Moshe. It’s got to be suicide. The guy was dying. Why try to kill him? Why take the chance?”
“All good questions. Still, I’m asking the National Police to have Kishla keep that Meral fellow on it for a while. I like him. I like the way he thinks. Could be Dimiter was killed. If he was and we find out who did it, that could lead us what Dimiter’s mission was here. Where he goes death will follow. But whose?”
Sandalls looked away and shook his head.
“You just won’t get off that,” he muttered.
“No.”
Zui picked up a newspaper from his desk. “I guess you’ve seen the bloody headline in the bloody Jerusalem Post today: ‘Man found dead in Christ’s Tomb was top killer for CIA?’ ”
Zui tossed the paper back onto the desk.
“Any notion who leaked this, Billy-Willy? I swear I’m going to find out and have him fed to giant ants.”
“The guy’s dead, Moshe. Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“The only cover you can blow now is the lid on his coffin.”
Which, in its way, would later prove to be prophetic.
CHAPTER 18
Mayo stared at the priest with incredulity.
“You’re not serious! I drive all this way and she isn’t here?”
“I’m so sorry, Mayo. Really. I woke up and she was gone. Scared of doctors, maybe. Young Palestinian woman. Scared of anyone with knives. Come on, sit down. She might be back here any minute. Who knows? Come on, I’ll make us some tea”
“How could she do that and be all that sick?”
“Oh, who knows?”
“You couldn’t call me?”
“There’s no phone here. We have to make our calls from the local Post Office, and the lines have been down all day. Sorry, Mayo. Really. And would you please have a seat, for heaven’s sakes?”
Mayo sighed and then nodded. “Okay.”
He sat down at a small round wooden table.
“How can you not have a phone?” he asked Mooney morosely.
“They never laid in the lines. We’d have to pay for it ourselves and we can’t afford it. It would cost us a fortune. Much better to use it for the poor.”
For the poor? wondered Mayo.
He’d remembered the priest’s chunky gold Rolex wristwatch.
“Okay, I’ll brew up the tea and then bring out the surprise.”
“Surprise?”
“The one I promised you. We grow them out back.??
?
“Grow what?” Mayo asked.
“Some lovely figs.”
CHAPTER 19
The young Syrian soldier who had killed the rival Christ at Hadassah Hospital tightly gripped the bars of an observation window in the door of a padded cell, his dark eyes pooling with a plea for understanding and with gratitude for Meral’s presence. After getting into bed that night, the policeman had grown restless and unable to sleep, his mind awhirl with the mystery of Dimiter’s mission, until at last he got up out of bed, dressed in uniform, called for a taxi, and went to Kfar Shaul.
“I am here with you, son. I am here. Are they treating you well?”
No answer. The soldier kept staring into Meral’s eyes.
“Are they giving you books? Things to read?”
In the standoff in the Psychiatric Ward, the ravings of the lunatic killer had displayed a keen intelligence and knowledge of theology far beyond his years and education. Certain states of brain disorder, according to the Kfar Shaul psychiatrists, at times created heightened intelligence, and as for the soldier’s knowledge of theology, it was presumed to have come from the books he was always seen reading in the Hadassah Psychiatric Ward.
“Are they?” Meral repeated.
The Syrian soldier’s wounded gaze never wavered.
But again he stayed silent.
“I have a question,” Meral at last said quietly. “And the answer is very important to me. You would be gifting me greatly with it. Very much. That time when I told you that now you were the only Christ in the city: You remember? It was on the way here. And you said to me, ‘No. There is another.’ Tell me, what did you mean?”
More silence. The mad soldier’s stare was unblinking.
“Tell me something. Tell me anything,” Meral asked urgently.
Unexpectedly the soldier spoke, saying cryptically, “ ‘They wanted to kill him but He passed through them.’ ”