Legends

by Robert Littell

  “I keep nodding when my clients can’t come up with the right word in English and wind up speaking Russian to me. They seem to think I understand them.”

  “Did you find the dog?”

  “Martin Odum always gets his dog.”

  She clanked glasses with him. “Here’s looking at you, Dante.” She sipped her daiquiri and eyed him over the rim of the glass. “You don’t by any chance do missing husbands?”

  The question hung in the air between them. Martin sucked on his Beedie for a moment, then said, very casually, “What makes you ask?”

  She drummed a forefinger against the side of her Fred Astaire nose. “Don’t play Trivial Pursuit with me, Pippen.”

  “Up to now I’ve steered clear of missing husbands.”

  “What about as of now?”

  Martin decided that his apartment wasn’t bugged after all; if it had been, Fred would have known he’d turned down Stella Kastner. “Missing husbands are not my cup of tea, mainly because ninety-nine times out of a hundred they have settled comfortably into new identities involving new women. And it is extremely difficult, as in statistically impossible, to find people who have their heart set on never returning to their old women.”

  A weight seemed to lift from Fred’s padded shoulders. She scooped another cube of ice from her daiquiri and ate it. “I have a soft spot for you, Dante. Honestly I do. In the eighties, in the early nineties, you were legendary for your legends. People still talk about you, though they refer to you by different names, depending on when they knew you. ‘What’s old Lincoln Dittmann up to these days?’ a topsider asked me just last week. Agents like you come along once or twice a war. You floated on a cloud of false identities and false backgrounds that you could reel off, complete with what zodiac signs and which relatives were buried in what cemetery. If I remember correctly, Dante Pippen was a lapsed Catholic—he could recite rosaries in Latin that he’d learned as an altar boy in County Cork, he had a brother who was a Jesuit priest in the Congo and a sister who worked in a convent-hospital in the Ivory Coast. There was the Lincoln Dittmann legend, where you’d been raised in Pennsylvania and taught history at a junior college. It was filled with anecdotes about a high school prom in Scranton that was raided by the police or an uncle Manny in Jonestown who made a small fortune manufacturing underwear for the Army during World War Two. In that incarnation you had visited every Civil War battlefield east of the Mississippi. You lived so many identities in your life you used to say there were times when you forgot which biographical details were real and which were invented. You plunged into your cover stories so deeply, you documented them so thoroughly, you lived them so intently, the disbursing office got confused about what name to use on your paycheck. I’ll tell you a dark secret, Dante: I not only admired your tradecraft, I envied you as a person. Everyone enjoys wearing masks, but the ultimate mask is having alternate identities that you can slip into and out of like a change of clothing—aliases, biographies to go with them, eventually, if you are really good, personalities and languages that go with the biographies.”

  With his Beedie, Martin playfully made the sign of the cross in the air. “Ave Maria, Gratia Plena, Dominus Tecumi, Benedicta Tu In Mulieribus.”

  Snickering, Fred waved at Xing in the mirror. “Would it be asking too much to get a check?” she called. She smiled sweetly at Martin. “I presume you’ve gotten the message I came all this way to deliver. Steer clear of missing husbands, Dante.”

  “Why?”

  The question irritated Fred. “Because I am telling you to steer clear, damn it. On the off chance you were to find him, why, we’d have to go back and take a hard look at certain decisions we made concerning you. In the end you turned out to be a rotten apple, Dante.”

  He didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about. “Maybe there were lines I couldn’t cross,” he said, trying to keep the conversation going; hoping to discover why he woke up nights in a cold sweat.

  “We didn’t hire your conscience, only your brain and your body. And then, one fine day, you stepped out of character—you stepped out of all your characters—and took what in popular idiom is called a moral stand. It slipped your mind that morality comes in a variety of flavors. At Langley, we held a summit. The choices before us were not complicated: We could either terminate your employment or terminate your life.”

  “What was the final vote?”

  “Would you believe it was fifty-fifty? Mine was the tiebreaker. I came down on the side of those who wanted to terminate your employment, on condition you signed up at one of our private asylums. We needed to be sure—”

  Before Fred could finish the sentence, Minh turned up carrying a small saucer with a check folded on it. She set it down between the two. Fred snared it and glanced at the bottom line, then peeled off two tens from a wad of bills and flattened them on the saucer. She weighed them down with a salt cellar. She and Martin sat silently, waiting for the waitress to remove the salt cellar and go off with the money.

  “I really did have a soft spot for you,” Fred finally said, shaking her head at a memory.

  Martin appeared to be talking to himself. “I needed help remembering,” he murmured. “I didn’t get any.”

  “Count your blessings,” Fred shot back. She slid off the banquette and stood up. “Don’t do anything to make me regret my vote, Dante. Hey, good luck with the detecting business. One thing I can’t abide is Chechens who swipe gold teeth before cremating the corpus delicti.”

  They were speeding up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway toward La Guardia Airport to catch the shuttle back to Washington when the telephone on the dashboard squawked. The Operations Directorate wallah doubling as a chauffeur snatched it out of the cradle and held it to his ear. “Wait one,” he said and passed the phone over his shoulder to Crystal Quest, dozing against a door in the back.

  “Quest,” she said into the receiver.

  She straightened in the seat. “Yes, sir, I did. Dante and I go back a long way—I’m sure the fact that I delivered the message in person convinced him we were not playing pickup sticks.” She listened for a moment. Up front the wallah surmised that the tinny bursts resonating from the earpiece were conveying exasperation in both tone and content.

  Quest scratched at her scalp through her rust colored hair. “I am definitely not going soft, Director—soft is not my style. I ran him when he was operational. Fact that he came in from the cold, as that English spy writer put it, doesn’t change anything. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still running him. As long as he doesn’t remember what happened—as long as he keeps his nose out of this Samat business—there’s no reason to revisit that decision.” She listened again, then said, coldly, “I take your point about unnecessary risks. If he steps over the fault—”

  The man on the other end of the phone finished the sentence for her; the wallah at the wheel could see his boss in the rear view mirror nodding as she took aboard an order.

  “Count on it,” Quest said.

  The line must have gone dead in her ear—the Director was notorious for ending conversations abruptly—because Quest leaned forward and dropped the telephone onto the passenger seat. Sinking back against the door, staring sightlessly out of the window, she started muttering disjointed phrases. After a while the words began taking on a sense. “Directors come and go,” she could be heard saying. “The ones who wind up in Langley through their ties to the White House aren’t the keepers of the flame—we are. We man the ramparts while the Director busts his balls working the Georgetown dinner circuit. We run the agents who put their lives on the line prowling the edge of empire. And we pay the price. Field agent drinks too much, controlling officer gets a hangover. Field agent turns sour, we curdle. Field agent dies, we break out the sackcloth and ashes and mourn for forty days and forty nights.” Quest sighed for her lost youth, her femaleness gone astray. “None of which,” she continued, her voice turning starchy, “would prevent us from terminating the son of a bitch if it
looked as if he might compromise the family’s jewel.”

  Martin’s bedside alarm went off an hour before first light. In case Fred had managed to plant a microphone after all, he switched on the radio and turned up the volume to cover his foot falls and the sound of doors closing. Still in his tracksuit, he climbed to the roof and worked the bellows of his smoker, sending the colony of bees in the second of the two hives into a frenzy of gorging on honey. Then he reached into the narrow space between the top of the frames and the top of the hive to extract the small packet wrapped in oilcloth. Back downstairs, Martin opened the refrigerator and stuck a plastic basin under the drip notch. In the faint light that came from the open refrigerator, he unfolded the oilcloth around the packet and spread out the contents on his cot. There were half a dozen American and foreign passports, a French Livret de Famille, three internal passports from East European countries, a collection of laminated driver’s licenses from Ireland and England and several East Coast states, an assortment of lending library and frequent flyer and Social Security cards, some of them brittle with age. He collected the identity papers and distributed them evenly between the cardboard lining and the top of the shabby leather valise with stickers from half a dozen Club Med resorts pasted on it. He filled the valise with shirts and underwear and socks and toilet articles, folded Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk bandanna on top, then changed his clothing, putting on a light three-piece suit and the sturdy rubber soled shoes he’d worn when he and Minh had hiked trails in the Adirondacks the year before. Looking around to see what he’d forgotten, he remembered the bees. He quickly scribbled a note to Tsou Xing asking him to use the spare front door key he’d left in the cash register to check the beehives every other day; if there wasn’t enough honey in the frames to see the bees through until spring, Tsou would know how to brew up sugar candy with the ingredients under the sink and deposit it in the hives.

  Carrying the valise and an old but serviceable Burberry, Martin made his way to the roof. He locked the roof door behind him and stashed the key under a loose brick in the parapet. Looking up at the Milky Way, or what you could see of it from a roof in the middle of Brooklyn, he was reminded of the Alawite prostitute Dante had come across in Beirut during one particularly hairy mission. Leaning on the parapet, he surveyed Albany Avenue for a quarter of an hour, watching the darkened windows across the street for the slightest movement of curtains or Venetian blinds or a glimpse of embers glowing on a cigarette. Finding no signs of life, he crossed the roof and studied the alleyway behind the Chinese restaurant. There was motion off to the right where Tsou Xing parked his vintage Packard, but it turned out to be a cat trying to work the lid off a garbage pail. When Martin was sure the coast was clear, he backed down the steel ladder and then carefully descended the fire escape to the first floor. There he untied the rope and lowered the last section to the ground (through runners that he’d greased every few months; for Martin, tradecraft was the nearest thing he had to a religion). He tested the quality of the stillness for another few minutes before letting himself down into Tsou Xing’s backyard heaped with stoves and pressure cookers and refrigerators that could one day be cannibalized for spare parts. He slipped the note for Tsou under the back door of the restaurant, crossed the yard to the alleyway and headed down it until he came to Lincoln Place. Two blocks down Lincoln, on the northeast corner of Schenectady, he ducked into a phone booth that reeked of turpentine. The first faint smudges of metallic gray were visible in the east as he checked the number written on his palm. Feeding a coin into the slot, he dialed it. The phone on the other end rang so many times that Martin began to worry he’d dialed the wrong number. He hung up and double checked the number and dialed again. He started counting how many times it rang and then gave up and just listened to it ring, wondering what to do if nobody answered. He was about to hang up—he would go to ground in a twenty-four hour diner on Kingston Avenue and try again in an hour—when someone finally came on the line.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?” a familiar voice demanded.

  “I have decided I can’t live without you. If you still want me, I think we can work something out.”

  Estelle Kastner caught her breath; she understood he was afraid the conversation was being overheard. “I’d given up on you,” she admitted. “When can you come over?”

  He liked her style. “How about now?”

  She gave him an address several blocks down President Street between Kingston and Brooklyn. “It’s a big private house. There’s a door around the side—the light over it will be on. I’ll be waiting for you in the vestibule.” On the off chance the phone really was tapped, Estelle added, “I’ve never had a relationship with someone whose sign isn’t compatible with mine. So what are you?”

  “Leo.”

  “Come on, you’re not a Leo. Leo’s are cock sure of themselves. If I had to guess, I’d say you have the profile of a Capricorn. Capricorns are impulsive, whimsical, stubborn as a mule in the good sense—once you start something, you finish it. Your being a Capricorn suits me fine.” She cleared her throat. “What made you change your mind. About calling?”

  She caught Martin’s soft laughter and found the sound curiously comforting. She heard him say, “I didn’t have a change of mind, I had a change of heart.”

  “Fools rush in,” she remarked, quoting from an old American song she played over and over on the phonograph, “where angels fear to tread.” She could hear Martin breathing into the phone. Just before she cut the connection, she said, more to herself than to him, “I have a weakness for men who don’t use aftershave.”

  1994: MARTIN ODUM GETS ON WITH HIS LIVES

  “COULD YOU SAY SOMETHING SO I CAN CHECK THE VOICE LEVEL?”

  “What should I say?”

  “Anything that comes into your head.”

  “‘… the silent cannons bright as gold rumble lightly over the stones. Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin the red business.’”

  “That’s fine. Remember to speak directly into the microphone. All right, here we go. For the record: We’re Thursday, the sixteenth of June, 1994. What follows is a tape recording of my first session with Martin Odum. My name is Bernice Treffler. I’m the director of the psychiatric unit at this private hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. If you want to break at any time, Mr. Odum, wave a hand. What were those lines from, by the way?”

  “One of Walter Whitman’s Civil War poems.”

  “Any reason you call him Walter instead of Walt?”

  “I was under the impression that people who knew him called him Walter.”

  “Are you a fan of Whitman’s?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. I didn’t know I knew the lines until I said them.”

  “Does the Civil War interest you?”

  “It doesn’t interest me, Martin Odum, but it interested—how can I explain this?—it interested someone close to me. In one of my incarnations, I was supposed to have taught a course in a junior college on the Civil War. When we were working up the legend—”

  “I’m sorry. The CIA people I’ve treated up to now have all been officers working at Langley. You’re my first actual undercover agent. What is a legend?”

  “It’s a fabricated identity. Many Company people use legends, especially when they operate outside the United States.”

  “Well, I can see my vocabulary is going to expand talking to you, Mr. Odum. Go on with what you were saying.”

  “What was I saying?”

  “You were saying something about working up a legend.”

  “Uh-huh. Since in my new incarnation I was supposed to be something of an expert on the subject, the person I was becoming had to study the Civil War. He read a dozen books, he visited many of the battlefields, he attended seminars, that sort of thing.”

  “He, not you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Was there a name assigned to this particular, eh, legend?”

  “Dittmann, with tw
o t’s and two n’s. Lincoln Dittmann.”

  “Do you have a headache, Mr. Odum?”

  “I can feel one starting to press against the back of my eyes. Could you crack a window? It’s very stuffy in here … Thanks.”

  “Would you like an aspirin?”

  “Later, maybe.”

  “Do you get headaches often?”

  “More or less often.”

  “Hmmm. What kind of person was this Lincoln Dittmann?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Was he different, say, from you? Different from Martin Odum?”

  “That was the whole point—to make him different so he could operate without anyone mistaking him for me or me for him.”

  “What could Lincoln Dittmann do that you couldn’t?”

  “To begin with, he was an extraordinary marksman, much more skilled than me. He would take his sweet time to be sure he got the kill, one shot to a target. He would crank in corrections for windage and distance and then slowly squeeze (as opposed to jerk) the trigger. I’m too high-strung to kill in cold blood unless I’m goaded into action by the likes of Lincoln. The few times in my life that I aimed at a human target, my mouth went dry, a pulse pounded in my temple, I had to will my trigger finger not to tremble. When a born-again sniper like Lincoln shot at a human target, the only thing he felt was the recoil of the rifle. What else? I was more proficient in tradecraft—I could melt into a crowd when there wasn’t one, so they said. Lincoln stood out in a crowd like a sore thumb. He was obviously more cerebral than me, or my other legend, for that matter. He was a better chess player, not because he was smarter than me, it’s just that I was too impatient, too restless to figure out the implications of any particular gambit, to work out what would happen eight or ten moves down the tube. Lincoln, on the other hand, was blessed with incredible patience. If an assignment required stalking someone, Lincoln was the agent of choice for the job. And then there was the way we each looked at the world.”