Dimiter (21 page)

”Thanks for the coffee.”

That night, Zui went home to the small apartment, close to the shore in Tel Aviv, where he lived with two young children and a wife with some renown in the city for having cheated death at Auschwitz when the guard in charge of admitting a line of doomed prisoners into a gas chamber studied her face and then said to the guards who had brought her, “No, no, take her away from here! Take her! She looks just like my daughter!”

“Have an interesting day?” she asked Zui as he came into the kitchen. Zui shrugged and shook his head as he took off his jacket and loosely draped it over a breakfast table chair.

“Just the usual routine.”

“Same here. God, we need some excitement in our lives.”

Zui turned and appraised her ironic smile.

And then he went to her and hugged her soul.

“
You
are the excitement in my life,” he said to her.

Life was the excitement in hers.

There would soon be enough to go around.

M
ayo stood behind his desk with a phone at his ear.

He checked his watch. He was late for an appointment.

“Your housekeeper?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“What’s her age?”

“Does that matter?”

“Yes, it matters.”

“Early forties.”

“Any swelling of the legs and ankles? Nasal stuffiness?”

“Yes. I’ve noticed both. And there are these tiny pale spots on her face: does that sound like it, Mayo?”

“Any numbness? Loss of feeling in her fingers or toes?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to ask her. I’m here on the pay phone at the post office. I’m so worried, Mayo. The woman’s so miserable. She’s sick as a dog.”

“There’s no one local who could deal with this?”

“No. Not like you. I don’t trust them.”

“Can’t you bring her in here? We’d be able to run tests.”

“Oh, I would but she’s feeling so out of it, Mayo. She’s got it coming out of both ends. It would be such a mercy if you’d come. Will you come? Incidentally, if you do, you can’t say anything about this to anyone. I’ve heard it’s highly curable now and that’s fine, but then someone hears leprosy, even today, and you know what would happen to us here. Can you come right away? It won’t take that much time. You could take her blood or whatever you need and then run your tests back there. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“So you’re coming?”

“Oh, well, alright, then; I’m coming. Not today, though. Too late. Tomorrow morning.”

“Bless your heart. And by the way, I’ll have a treat for you to take back home. It’s something I know you like. The trees in our yard are in fruit and I swear they’re the best I’ve ever eaten.”

“The best what?”

“Never mind. It’s a surprise.”

“How very nice.”

“It’s the least that I can do for you. The least.”

W
illiam Sandalls ushered Inspector Zui into a room on the second floor of the American Embassy in Tel Aviv and then led him to a chair at the end of a highly polished dark pine conference table, where he placed an untitled file folder in front of him stamped
TOP SECRET.

“Of course we had to redact some,” said Sandalls. “Oh, well, a lot. But there it is. When you’re all done reading it, you’ll finally understand that we know nothing about any mission for him here, or for that matter, anyplace else, for at
least the last three years. But no notes, Moshe. Okay? You won’t need them. Let me know when you’re done and we’ll talk.”

He pointed to a button on the side of the table. “Here’s the buzzer.”

“Where’s Bell?”

“Busy-busy. Might pop in on us later. By the way, we want the body flown back to D.C. We’d like to run another autopsy.”

“Fine. Yes, alright. Of course.”

Zui watched as Sandalls trod noiselessly on thickly piled brown wool carpeting, opened a door and then quietly closed it behind him. It had been four days since the autopsy’s final conclusion that the name on death’s calling card for the man found dead in Christ’s tomb was undoubtedly “pulmonary edema,” the result of the venom of an Omdurman Scorpion, abundantly found in the Israeli desert and known by the alternate name “The Deathstalker.” Also discovered by the drug screen were massive amounts of chloral hydrate, the so-called “Mickey Finn,” which together with the venom would kill within less than ninety minutes. There were also residual traces of morphine tied to the multiple scars of injection sites on the dead man’s arms and legs that were likely related to his trauma from the burns, or the cancer, or both. Was it murder or suicide? No one could be absolutely certain.

What was clear was that the dead man’s name was not Joseph Temescu. The damage to his face from third-degree burns rendered photo comparisons of less than perfect use, and while due to the burning of his hand a complete set of fingerprints could not be had, this was actually irrelevant inasmuch as the agency the dead man had worked for didn’t have
them on file, nor were any photos of him extant, this against the chance that a mole might one day copy them and compromise the life of their most valuable asset. But there were other things helping to establish his identity, beginning with a tracheotomy scar, and the multiple passports in his possession, as well as the Iron Curtain dentistry and the letter with its brief and innocuous content, discovered in the inside pocket of his jacket, that began with the words “Dear Paul.” But the proof that some would deem to be finally dispositive was the worn and faded identity card of a country where the dead man had performed two missions.

There was also something else to be added to the proof that, because of the burns on the dead man’s face, was not totally dispositive, but when taken together with all the other evidence seemed to be the turn of the screw on all doubt. To the morgue where the body was kept, Shin Bet agent Hyam Dov brought a one-time British Special Intelligence agent, who among his frequent alcoholic blathers had been heard to drop the name of the mysterious dead man, indiscreetly asserting he had worked with him once on “a frightfully dangerous mission, you see” in Nazi-occupied Poland.

“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.