Legends

by Robert Littell

  Martin closed his eyes and summoned up an image of Taletbek Rabbani suspended from an overhead pipe while an assassin stabbed him in the neck. Trying to pick up Samat’s trail, the Chechens, beardless in London, had come back to haunt the old one-legged Tajik warrior sooner than he’d imagined.

  1994: THE ONLY FODDER WAS CANNON FODDER

  “WHEN WE LEFT OFF LAST WEEK, MARTIN,” DR. TREFFLER WAS saying, “you were commenting on the fact”—her eyes flicked down to the notes in her loose-leaf notebook—“that you are able to do some things well the first time you try.”

  The Company psychiatrist, wearing a tight skirt cut above the knee, uncrossed and recrossed her legs. As her thigh flashed into view, Martin turned his head away. He understood that everything she did had a purpose; the business with the legs was her way of harvesting information about his sex drive, assuming he had a sex drive. He wondered what another psychiatrist would make of Dr. Treffler’s way of taking notes, filling the loose-leaf pages from top to bottom and edge to edge with a runty scrawl, the letters all leaning into some nonexistent emotional blizzard. Solzhenitsyn had written Ivan Denisovich that way, but he’d been coming off eight years in Stalin’s gulag. What was her excuse? What did it mean when you didn’t like margins?

  “Yes, I remember now,” Martin said finally. Through the panes of the window and the green metal mesh (put there to keep clients from jumping?) he could make out a bit of Maryland countryside; could see the last brown leaves clinging to the branches of trees. He felt an instinctive admiration for their tenacity. “It’s always intrigued me,” he continued because she expected him to; because she sat there with her legs crossed and her thigh visible and her Mont Blanc fountain pen poised over the loose-leaf page. “It struck me as funny how some things you do, you do them well the first time.”

  “Such as?” she inquired in a voice so toneless it betrayed absolutely no curiosity about the answer.

  “Such as peeling a tangerine. Such as cutting a fuse for plastic explosive long enough to give you time to get out of its killing range. Such as pulling off a brush pass with a cutout in one of Beirut’s crowded souks.”

  “What legend were you using in Beirut?”

  “Dante Pippen.”

  “Wasn’t he the one”—Bernice (they’d been on a first name basis for the last several sessions) had flipped to another page in her loose-leaf notebook—“who was supposed to have been teaching history at a junior college? The one who wrote a book on the Civil War that he printed privately when he couldn’t find a publisher willing to take it on?”

  “No, you’re thinking of Lincoln Dittmann, with two t’s and two n’s. Pippen was the Irish dynamiter from Castletownbere who started out as an explosives instructor on the Farm. Later, posing as an IRA dynamiter, he infiltrated a Sicilian Mafia family, the Taliban mullahs in Peshawar, a Hezbollah unit in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. It was this last mission that blew his cover.”

  Dr. Treffler nodded as she added a note to the page. “I have a hard time keeping track of your various identities.”

  “Me, too. That’s why I’m here.”

  She looked up from the loose-leaf notebook. “Are you sure you have identified all of your operational biographies?”

  “I’ve identified the ones I remember.”

  “Do you have the feeling you might be repressing any?”

  “Don’t know. According to your theory, there’s a good chance I’m repressing at least one of them.”

  “The literature on the subject more or less agrees—”

  “I thought you weren’t convinced that I fit neatly into the literature on the subject.”

  Dr. Treffler flashed one of her very rare smiles, which looked like a foreign object on her normally expressionless face. “You are hors genre, Martin, there’s no doubt about it. Nobody in my profession has come across anyone quite like you. It will cause quite a stir when I publish my paper—”

  “Changing the names to protect the innocent.”

  “Changing the names to protect the guilty, too.”

  “You’re getting into the spirit of things, Bernice. The people who pay you for shrinking my head will be very pleased.”

  “A psychiatrist doesn’t shrink the patient’s head, Martin. We shrink their problems.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “Tell me more about Lincoln Dittmann.”

  “Such as?”

  “Anything that comes to mind will do nicely.” When he still hesitated, she said, “Listen, Martin, you can tell me anything you can tell the Director of the CIA.”

  “Anything?”

  “That’s why you’re in this room. This is a private clinic. The doctors who work here have been cleared to hear state secrets. We get to treat the people who, for one reason or another, need help before returning to civilian life.”

  “If you were the Director and I was sitting like this facing you, our knees almost touching—”

  Bernice nodded encouragement. “Go on.”

  “I’d tell you that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Then I’d tell you that the CIA is an intelligence agency designed by the same committee. And then I’d remind you that in every civilization known to man, the ratio of horses asses to horses has been greater than one.”

  “You’re angry.” She jotted something on the loose-leaf page. “It’s perfectly all right to be angry. Don’t be afraid to let it out.”

  Martin shrugged. “I thought I was just expressing some healthy cynicism.”

  “Lincoln Dittmann,” she said, tugging the conversation back to her question.

  “He was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania named Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant who had come to America after World War Two. His father owned a chain of hardware stores, with the main depot in Fredericksburg, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. He wound up spending several months a year in Fredericksburg and took his son with him when the trips fell during school vacations. Lincoln used his free time to scour the battlefield for souvenirs—in those days you could still find rusting bayonets or cannon balls or the barrels of muzzle loading rifles in the fields after a torrential rain. By the time he reached his teens, when the other kids his age were reading Batman comics, Lincoln could recount every detail of the battle of Fredericksburg. At Lincoln’s urging, his father began buying Civil War paraphernalia from the farmers during his turn around the hardware stores—he returned home with rifles and bayonets and powder horns and Federal medals on the backseat of his Studebaker—”

  “Not Confederate medals?”

  “The Confederates didn’t give medals to their soldiers. When Lincoln went off to college, he already had quite a collection. He even owned a rare English Whitworth, the weapon of choice for Confederate sharpshooters. The paper cartridges were damned expensive but a skilled sniper could hit anything he could see.”

  “Where did he go to college?”

  “University of Pennsylvania. Majored in American history. Wrote his senior thesis on the battle of Fredericksburg. When he began teaching at the junior college, he turned it into a book.”

  “That was the book he printed himself when he couldn’t find a publisher?”

  “It was a bitter disappointment to him, not finding a legitimate publisher.”

  “What was it about Fredericksburg that was so special?”

  Martin’s hand, clammy with perspiration, came up to massage his brow. The involuntary gesture wasn’t lost on Dr. Treffler. “It was early in December of 1862,” he began, staring vacantly out of the window at the horizon, watching for the flashes of the great battle being fought beyond it. “There was a new Federal general in charge of the Army of the Potomac, his name was Burnside. Ambrose Burnside. He thought he saw a way to end the war with one swift assault across Virginia to capture the Confederate capitol, Richmond. It was a brilliant plan. President Lincoln signed off on it and Burnside force-marched his troops down the Potomac to a point across the river from Fredericksburg. If he coul
d surprise the rebels and take the city, the road to Richmond would be open and the war would end almost before it got going. Burnside had put in an urgent order for pontoon bridges, but when he reached Fredericksburg he discovered that the War Department hadn’t dispatched them. The Union army wound up bivouacking for ten days on its side of the river waiting for the Goddamn bridges, giving Robert Lee time to bring up his army and mass it on the heights above the city. When the bridges finally arrived and Burnside crossed the river, he found Bobby Lee and seventy-five thousand Confederates blocking the road to Richmond. The weather was wintry, the autumnal mud in the rutted roads had turned hard. The Federals, advancing across sloping open ground, came on all day, wave after wave of them in their spanking bright factory-made uniforms. The Rebels in homespun dyed with plant pigments, fighting from behind a low stone wall at the edge of a sunken road at the foot of Marye’s Hill, beat back every attack. The sharpshooters, armed with Whitworths, picked off the Federal officers so easily that many of them began tearing off their insignias as they went into the line. Groups of Federals tried to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. Burnside kept track of the progress of the fighting from the roof of the Chatham Mansion across the river. From a knob up on the heights, the Mansion was within eyeshot and Bobby Lee pointed it out to Stonewall Jackson—he told him that thirty years before he’d courted the lady he wound up marrying at that very house. On the ridge line, a Confederate band belted out waltzes for the southern gentlemen and ladies who had come down from Richmond to see the battle. Old Pete Longstreet, with a woman’s woolen shawl draped over his shoulders, watched the fighting unfolding below him through a long glass fixed to a wooden tripod in front of the Confederate command post. It took a time to convince him that the Federal attack on the sunken road wasn’t a feint—he couldn’t swallow the idea that Burnside was squandering his life’s blood in a frontal attack that had no chance of succeeding. At one point an Irish Brigade made it to within fifteen paces of the sunken road and even the Rebels watching from the heights cheered their courage. But the 24th Georgians behind the low stone wall, firing and loading and firing so steadily their teeth ached from biting off the paper cartridges, turned back that attack, too. Burnside launched fourteen assaults on the heights before darkness blotted out the killing fields. When the Federals finally retreated across the river the next day and counted noses, they discovered that nine thousand Union men had fallen at Fredericksburg.”

  Martin sat humped over in the chair now, his lids squeezed shut, the flat of a hand pressed to his forehead damming the migraine building up behind his eyes. “When Lincoln Dittmann went to Washington to research the book, he discovered Burnside’s original order for the pontoon bridges in the army archives. The word ‘Urgent’ had been inked out, probably by a Confederate sympathizer working at the War Department. You asked what was so special about Fredericksburg—Dittmann concluded that if the pontoon bridges had been delivered on time, the war might have ended there in 1862 instead of dragging on until 1865.”

  Martin, drained, went quiet. For some while the only sound in the small airless room came from the whir of the tape recorder and the nib of Dr. Treffler’s pen etching long lines of runty letters onto the loose-leaf page. When she finally looked up from her notebook, she asked, very softly, “How does Martin Odum know all this? The fact that the Confederates didn’t give medals, the flats of sabres driving the Federals away from the shelter of brick houses, the Chatham Mansion, the band playing waltzes on Marye’s Hill while Longstreet, with a shawl over his shoulders, watched the Georgians in homespun dyed with plant pigments fight off fourteen attacks on the sunken road—it’s almost as if you’d been there!”

  Martin’s mouth had gone dry and the words that emerged from his lips rang tinny and hollow, the second half of an echo that had lost some of its shrillness on the way back. “Lincoln Dittmann was there,” he said. “He told me the details.”

  Dr. Treffler leaned forward. “You heard Lincoln Dittmann’s voice describing the battle?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did he tell you he’d been there during the battle? Did he tell you he’d seen the fighting with his own eyes?”

  “Not in so many words …”

  “But you—you being Martin Odum—you assumed he’d been an eyewitness at Fredericksburg.”

  “He must have been there,” Martin insisted plaintively. “How else could he have known all the things he knew? Lincoln told me lots more that isn’t in any books.” The words spilled out of Martin now. “The night of the battle temperatures plunged to below freezing … even in the cold of winter there were horseflies drawn to the blood oozing from wounds … the maimed Federals who were still alive dragged the dead into heaps and burrowed under the corpses to keep warm … riderless horses pawed at the frozen ground looking for fodder, but the only fodder at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862 was cannon fodder.” Martin took a deep breath. “That was the last line of Lincoln’s book. The title came from the line. The book was called Cannon Fodder.”

  Dr. Treffler waited for Martin’s breathing to settle down before she spoke. “Listen to me, Martin. Lincoln Dittmann is your contemporary. He wasn’t alive in 1862, which means he couldn’t have been at the battle of Fredericksburg.”

  Martin didn’t respond. Dr. Treffler caught herself staring at him and turned away quickly, then laughed out loud and looked back. “Wow! This is stunning. You heard Lincoln Dittmann’s voice at our first session—he gave you the lines of that Walt Whitman poem you recited.”

  “I remember. ‘Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin the red business.’ That wasn’t the first time I heard Lincoln’s voice—he’s been whispering in my ear for years. By the way, it’s Walter Whitman, not Walt. Lincoln told me he’d come across Whitman in a Federal field hospital after Burnside retreated from Fredericksburg—the poet was worried sick about his brother who’d taken part in the battle and was looking everywhere for him. Lincoln recalled that the soldiers who knew Whitman called him Walter.”

  “Lincoln told you about Whitman being in the field hospital? About the soldiers calling him Walter?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did he recall it from having been there or from having read about it somewhere?”

  Martin seemed not to want to deal with the question.

  Dr. Treffler decided Martin had had enough stress for one session. “Your headache starting in again?” she asked.

  “It’s blinding me.”

  “What do you see when your eyes are shut tight like that?”

  Martin thought about that. “A long blur of headlights, as if a camera has been set up on an overpass and the lens has been locked open to capture the streak of the cars speeding past underneath. Or the cosmos, yes, the entire cosmos in its big-bang mode, expanding, inflating like a balloon with small black spots painted on it, and each spot on the balloon receding from every other spot.”

  “And how will this big bang end?”

  “With me, marooned on one of the spots, alone in the universe.”

  1990: LINCOLN DITTMANN TAKES ON A LIFE OF HIS OWN

  TO THE ABIDING SATISFACTION OF ITS EIGHT SITTING MEMBERS, the Legend Committee had been upgraded from its windowless basement storage space at Langley to a fourth-floor conference room drenched in sunlight. That was the upside. The downside was that the new digs had an impregnable view of the vast outdoor parking lot used by the Company plebeians. (The patricians from the seventh floor, including Crystal Quest, the current Deputy Director of Operations and the Committee’s immediate boss, all rated parking spaces in the underground garage, along with an elevator that whisked them to work without stopping at other floors along the way.) “Can’t have everything,” sighed the former station chief who chaired the Legend Committee the first time he set foot in the room the housekeepers were proposing and looked out one of the windows; he’d been hoping for Vir
ginia countryside, not asphalt. To mask his disappointment he came up with the aphorism that had been engraved over the door to the inner sanctum when he presided over Cairo Station oh so many years ago: “Yom asal, yom basal … One day honey, one day onions.”

  “Where the heck are we?” he was asking Maggie Poole, who had specialized in medieval French history at Oxford and had never entirely lost her acquired British accent, an affectation particularly remarkable when she slipped French words into the conversation.

  “We’re on the fourth étage,” she replied now, purposefully misunderstanding the question to get his goat. “Up here the water coolers are in the corridor outside the rooms, not inside.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, that’s not what I meant and you know it. You do that every occasion you can.”

  “Moi?” Maggie Poole blurted out innocently. “Certainly not.”

  “What he’s asking,” said the Yale-educated aversion therapist, “is where are we up to with the new legend for Dante Pippen.”

  Dante, sitting with his spine against a soft pillow to relieve the pressure on the shrapnel wound in his lower back, thought of these sessions as indoor sport. It was a painless way to pass an afternoon even if his game leg and the back wound ached more or less round the clock. He closed his eyes to shield them from the bright sunlight slanting through the open Venetian blinds and relished the warmth on the skin of his face. “I thought this time around,” he offered, and he could almost hear the bones creaking as the ancient mariners of the Legend Committee craned their necks to stare at him, “we could begin in Pennsylvania.”

  “Why Pennsylvania?” demanded the lexicographer on loan from University of Chicago and happy to be; the per diem the Company deposited in his bank account somehow never got reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

  The committee’s doyen, a CIA veteran who began his professional career creating legends for the OSS agents during World War Two and never let anyone forget it, fitted on a pair of perfectly round wire spectacles and flipped open the original Martin Odum 201 Central Registry folder. “Pennsylvania,” he observed, straining to make out the small type on the bio file, “seems as good a place to start as any. Mr. Pippen’s predecessor, Martin Odum, spent the first eight years of his life in Pennsylvania, in a small town called Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant, his father ran a small factory producing underwear for the U.S. Army.”