Legends

by Robert Littell

  “Jonestown was within driving distance of several Civil War battlefields and Martin wound up going to a bunch of them while he was in grade school,” Dante said from the sideline. “His favorite, which he must have visited two or three times, was Fredericksburg.”

  “Could visiting Fredericksburg make someone a Civil War expert?” Maggie Poole inquired eagerly; she had caught a glimpse of where they could be heading.

  “Martin was a Fredericksburg expert, for sure,” Dante said with a laugh. His eyes were still tightly closed and he was beginning, once again, to enjoy the business of legend building; it seemed to him the closest he’d ever come to novel writing. “His stories about the battle there were so graphic, people who heard them sometimes jokingly wondered if he’d taken part in the Civil War.”

  “Can you give us some examples?” the chairman asked.

  “He would describe Bobby Lee, up on Marye’s Hill inland from Fredericksburg, pointing out Burnside’s command post in the Chatham Mansion across the Potomac to Stonewall Jackson and recalling that he’d courted his wife under that roof thirty years before. Martin would describe Old Pete Longstreet, his shoulders draped in a woman’s woolen shawl, watching the battle unfolding below him through a long glass fixed to a wooden tripod and telling everyone within earshot that the Federal attack on the sunken road had to be a feint, that the main attack would come somewhere else.”

  The Legend Committee chairman peered at Dante over the rim of his wire eyeglasses. “Was Bobby Lee the General we know as Robert E. Lee?” he asked.

  “One and the same,” Dante said from his place along the wall. “The Virginians called him Bobby Lee—though never to his face.”

  “Well, this does open avenues for exploration,” the chairman told the others. “Our man may not be a Civil War expert, but with a little help from his friends he could certainly pass for one, couldn’t he?”

  “Which brings us to the name,” Maggie Poole said. “And what could be more logique for a Civil War expert than calling him Lincoln?”

  “I suppose you were thinking of using Abraham as a first name,” sneered the aversion therapist.

  “Va te faire cuire un oeuf,” Maggie Poole shot back. She glared at the aversion therapist, clearly tempted to stick her tongue out at him. “I was thinking along the lines of using Lincoln as a prenom because it would tend to give credibility to a Civil War legend.”

  “Lincoln something or other sounds quite elegant to me,” Dante called from the wall.

  “Merci, Mr. Pippen, for being so open minded, which is more than I can say for some others in this room,” ventured Maggie Poole.

  “I once knew a gun collector in Chicago whose name was Dittmann—that’s with two ‘t’s and two ‘n’s,” said the lexicographer. “There was some suggestion that Dittmann wasn’t his real name but that’s neither here nor there. He specialized in Civil War firearms. His pride and joy was an English sniper rifle, it was called the Whentworth or Whitworth, something like that. As I recall, the paper cartridges were exorbitant, but in the hands of a skilled sharpshooter the rifle was considered to be a lethal weapon.”

  “Lincoln Dittmann is a name with … weight,” the chairman decided. “How does it strike you, Mr. Pippen?”

  “I could learn to live with it,” he agreed. “And it would certainly be original to turn a field agent into a Civil War expert.”

  The members of the Legend Committee knew they had hit pay dirt and the ideas started to come thick and fast.

  “He could start building the legend by visiting all the battle grounds.”

  “He ought to have a collection personnelle of Civil War firearms, I should think.”

  “I like having guns around,” Pippen announced from his seat. “Come to think of it, a personal collection of Civil War weapons would make a great cover for an arms dealer, which is where Fred Astaire is heading with this legend.”

  “So we need to think in terms of a legend for an arms dealer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who in God’s name is Fred Astaire?”

  “It’s Mrs. Quest’s in-house nickname.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “In what part of the world would Lincoln Dittmann be operating? Who would be his clients?”

  Lincoln had to be careful not to give away family jewels. “His clients would be a hodgepodge of people who are out to hurt America,” he said.

  “To step into Lincoln Dittmann’s shoes, you would have to do your homework.”

  “Do you mind reading up on a subject, Mr. Pippen?”

  “Not at all. Sounds fun to me.”

  “He’d need professional credentials.”

  “Okay. Let’s summarize. He was raised in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, and visited Fredericksburg so often as a child that he knew the battlefield backward and forward at a time when his young friends were reading Batman comics.”

  “His father could have owned a chain of hardware stores with the central depot in Fredericksburg, which meant he would have had to spend a lot of time there in any given year. Nothing would have been more natural than to have taken his young son with him whenever he could

  “Of course! He would have taken him along to Fredericksburg during school vacations. The young Lincoln Dittmann would have joined the boys scouring the battlefield for Civil War souvenirs that wash up to the surface after heavy rainfalls.”

  “At some point Lincoln would have encouraged his father to hunt for rifles and powder horns and medals when he drove around—let’s give him a Studebaker, which was a popular car after the war—checking on his hardware stores. The local farmers keep these Civil War things in their attics and Lincoln’s father would have brought something back with him after each trip.”

  “If I collected medals,” Pippen noted, “they’d all have to be from the Union Army. Confederate Army didn’t award medals.”

  “How did they get their soldiers to soldier if they didn’t award medals?”

  “They were fighting for a cause they believed in,” Pippen said.

  “They were defending slavery, for God’s sake—”

  “Most of the Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves,” Pippen said. (Things that Martin had picked up during those visits to Fredericksburg so many years earlier were coming back to him.) “They were fighting so the North wouldn’t try and tell them what they could do and what they couldn’t do. Besides which, when the war started, Lincoln—I’m talking about Abraham, the president—didn’t have the slightest intention of abolishing slavery and freeing the slaves. Nobody on either side of the Mason-Dixon line would have accepted this because nobody had any idea what to do with the millions of slaves in the Confederate states if they were freed. Yankees didn’t want emancipated slaves trekking north and stealing their manufacturing jobs for lower salaries. Southerners didn’t want them homesteading Confederate land and growing cotton that could be marketed cheaper than plantation cotton. Or even worse, voting in local elections.”

  “He really is something of a Civil War buff already.”

  “Our Lincoln Dittmann ought to have been a professeur at one point, don’t you think?”

  “He could have taught Civil War history in some college. Why not?”

  “Problem: To teach in a college you need an advanced degree. Even if he reads up on the Civil War, he might not be able to convince a real Civil War expert that he earned a Ph.D. in the subject.”

  “Let him teach at a junior college, then. That way he wouldn’t need an advanced degree. And what he knows about the Civil War could pass muster.”

  “It would add to his credibility if he were to write a book on the subject.”

  “Hang on,” Pippen said. “I don’t think I have the stamina to write a book.”

  “Takes more than stamina. I know because I’ve written three. You need mettle if you’re going to refuse to be intimidated by all the options.”

  “We could farm out the book. We could get it written for you and have a small university press tha
t owes us a favor publish it under your name. The Battle of Fredericksburg by Lincoln Dittmann.”

  “I’ve got the perfect title: Cannon Fodder. With a subtitle: The Battle of Fredericksburg.”

  “Let’s not get bogged down with the title, for goodness sake.”

  “What do you think of all this, Mr. Pippen?”

  “It’s first rate cover. Nobody would suspect an arms dealer who had been teaching Civil War history at a junior college of being CIA.”

  “There’s something’s missing from this legend.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Motivation is what’s missing. Why has Lincoln Dittmann sunk so low. Why is he associating with the scum of the earth, people who, by definition, are not friends of l’Amerique?”

  “Good point, Maggie.”

  “Because he’s angry at America.”

  “Why? Why is he angry at America?”

  “He got into a some sort of jam. He was humiliated—”

  Dante piped up from the sideline. “I don’t mind being humiliated, but I’d appreciate it if sex weren’t involved. You people always think of sex when you want to put something into a biography that discredits the principal. Next thing you know Lincoln Dittmann will be a closet transvestite or something like that.”

  “We take your point, Mr. Pippen.”

  “What if the jam involved plagiarism.”

  “He swiped the heart of Cannon Fodder from a treatise published in the twenties or thirties that he found in the stacks of a library.”

  “That would simplify matters for us. We wouldn’t have to pay someone to write the book on Fredericksburg; we could find a treatise—there must be thousands of them lying around on shelves gathering dust—and copy it.”

  “My luck,” Dante groaned, “I finally get to be the author of a book and it turns out I plagiarized it.”

  “It’s that or sexual deviation.”

  “I’ll take plagiarism.”

  “A reviewer in an historical periodical—tipped off by an anonymous letter sent by us—could blow the whistle on Dittmann, at which point he would lose his tenure and his job.”

  “His professional reputation would be ruined.”

  “Nobody else in the wide world of academia would touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. The colleges put pressure on you to publish or perish and they expect you to hold down a full teaching load and do the research and writing in your free time.”

  “The experience left Lincoln Dittmann a bitter cynic. He wanted to get back at the college, at the system, at the country.”

  “I’d say we’re halfway home, gentlemen and ladies. The only thing that remains is to try all this out on our taskmaster, the DDO, Crystal Quest herself.”

  Dante Pippen reached for the cane propped against the wall and used it to push himself to his feet. Dull pain stabbed at his lower back and sore leg, but he was so elated he barely noticed it. “I think Crystal Quest is going to be very satisfied with the Lincoln Dittmann legend,” he told the members of the Legend Committee. “I know I am.”

  1991: LINCOLN DITTMANN WORKS THE ANGLES OF THE TRIANGLE

  “HOW DID YOU GET INTO THE BUSINESS OF SELLING WEAPONS?” THE Egyptian wanted to know.

  “Chances are you won’t believe me if I tell you,” Lincoln Dittmann said.

  “If he don’t believe you,” said the short American with the tooled cowboy boots and tapered Levis and slicked back hair, “you’re in deep shit.” He spoke in a Texas drawl so silky that Lincoln had to strain to make out the words.

  The Egyptian and the Texan, strange bedfellows in this godforsaken Paraguayan frontier town across the border from Brazil, both laughed under their breaths, though there was no trace of mirth in their voices. Lincoln, sprawled on a sofa, his bad leg stretched straight out in front of him, the cane within arm’s reach, his hands clasped behind his head, laughed with them. “I was teaching Civil War history at a junior college,” he said. “My area of expertise—I wrote a book on the subject once—was the battle of Fredericksburg. Collecting Civil War weapons seemed like the natural thing to do. My pièce de résistance is a rare English Whitworth.”

  “That there’s a sniper rifle, ain’t it?” said the Texan.

  Lincoln looked impressed. “Aren’t many people around who can tell the difference between a Whitworth and an ordinary barnyard Enfield.”

  “My daddy had one,” the Texan said proudly. “Feds went an’ impounded it along with his other guns when he was nabbed for burning a nigger church to the ground in Al’bama.” He tilted his head back and regarded Lincoln warily. The Texan, who had introduced himself as Leroy Streeter when he’d picked Lincoln up in front of the mosque with the gold-tinted roof on Palestine Street across the border in Foz do Iguaçú, said, “Go and describe your Whitworth?”

  Lincoln smiled to himself. Back at Langley, they’d learned from the FBI that Leroy Streeter’s father had once owned a Civil War Whitworth; they’d reckoned the son would be familiar with the weapon. If Leroy’s quiz was what passed for checking bona fides in Triple Border, it certainly was amateur hour; an undercover agent wouldn’t name drop—even the name of an antique rifle—if he couldn’t backstop it with details. Fact of the matter was that Lincoln did own a Whitworth—a collection of Civil War weapons went with the Dittmann legend. He’d even fabricated cartridges and gone out to a remote landfill in New Jersey to see if the rifle was as accurate as its reputation held. It was. “Mr. Whitworth’s rifle,” he told Leroy now, “came factory-equipped with a low-powered brass scope fixed atop the hexagonal barrel. Not many of the Whitworths around these days, even in museums, still have the scope. Mine also has the original brass tampon to plug the barrel against humidity and dust. The scope’s fitted with little engraved wheels to sight the rifle and adjust for latitude and longitude errors.”

  As he spoke, Lincoln kept his eyes on the Egyptian, who obviously ran the show here. He had not been introduced—though Lincoln had a good idea of his identity; the FBI’s briefing book back in Washington had contained a blurry photo taken with a telephoto lens of an Egyptian known as Ibrahim bin Daoud talking to a man identified as a Hezbollah agent in front of the entrance to the Maksoud Plaza Hotel in São Paulo the previous year. The long delicate nose and carefully trimmed gray beard visible in the photo were conspicuous on the Egyptian sitting on the sill across from him now.

  Stretched out on the unmade bed in the room above a bar in Ciudad del Este on the Paraguay side of Triple Border, the muddy heels of his boots digging into the mattress, Leroy was nodding emphatically at the Egyptian. “He sure as hell’s got hisself a Whitworth,” he confirmed.

  Lincoln was hoping that gun collecting could provide a useful bond between him and the Texan. “Crying shame about your daddy’s Whitworth,” he said. “Bet the FBI goons didn’t have the wildest idea what a goddamn prize they had in their hands when they confiscated it.”

  “They was too fucking dumb to tell the difference between fool’s gold and actual gold,” Leroy agreed.

  Lincoln looked back at the Egyptian. “To answer your question: From the Whitworth and my other guns, it was just a matter of branching out to Kalashnikovs and TOW antitank missiles, with the grenades and ammunition thrown in for good measure. Pays a lot better than teaching Civil War history at a junior college.”

  “We are not in the market for Kalashnikovs and TOWs,” the Egyptian noted coldly.

  “He’s not interested in Ak-47s and TOWs,” the Texan explained. “Now that Commie Russia’s got one foot in the grave, you trip over this kind of hardware out here on Triple Border. He’s interested in Semtex or ammonium nitrate, something in the neighborhood of eighty thousand pounds of it, enough to fill one of those big moving vans. We pay cash on the barrelhead.”

  Lincoln locked his eyes on the Egyptian. He was a skeletal man with a round pockmarked face and hunched shoulders, probably in his late fifties, though the gray beard could have
been adding years to his appearance. The upper third of his face had disappeared behind dark sunglasses, which he wore despite being in a dingy room with the shades drawn. “Semtex in small quantities is no problem. Ammonium nitrate in any quantity is also no problem,” he said. “You probably know that ammonium nitrate is used as fertilizer—mixed with diesel or fuel oil, it is highly explosive. The trick’ll be to buy a large amount without attracting attention, which is something I and my associates can organize. Where do you want to take delivery?”

  Leroy smiled out of one side of his mouth. “At a site to be specified on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel.”

  Lincoln heard the cry of the muezzin—it wasn’t a recording but the real thing—summoning the faithful to midday prayer, which meant he’d been taken somewhere within earshot of the only mosque in Ciudad del Este after Leroy had picked him up in front of the mosque in Foz do Iguaçú. He’d been shoved into the back of a Mercedes and ordered to strap on the blackened-out ski goggles he found on the seat. “You taking me to the Saudi?” he’d asked Leroy as the Mercedes drove in circles for three quarters of a hour to confuse him. “I’m taking you to meet the Saudi’s Egyptian,” Leroy had answered. “If the Egyptian signs off on you, that’s when you get to meet the Saudi, not before.” Lincoln had asked, “What happens if he doesn’t sign off on me?” Leroy, sitting up front alongside the driver, had snorted. “If’n he don’t sign off on you, he’ll like as feed you to the pet crocodile he keeps in his swim pool.”

  Now Lincoln could feel Daoud scrutinizing him through his dark sunglasses. “Where did you hurt your leg?” the Egyptian asked.