Legends (2 page)

“They… damaged me, Samat?” Kafkor whispered huskily. He could make out the shock of silver hair on the figure watching from the back seat of the Mercedes. “They locked me in a basement awash in sewage, I could not distinguish night from day, I lost track of time, they woke me… with loud music when I fell asleep. Where, explain it to me if there exists an explanation, is the why?” The condemned man spoke Russian with a distinct Polish accent, emphasizing the open O’s and stressing the next to last syllable. Terror tortured his sentences into baroque grammatical configurations. “The endmost thing I would tell to nobody is what I am not supposed to know.”

Samat shrugged as if to say, The matter is out of my hands. “You arrive too close to the flame, you must suffer burning, if only to warn others away from the flame.”

Trembling, Kafkor puffed on the cigarette. The act of smoking, and the smoke cauterizing his throat, appeared to distract him. Samat stared at the ash, waiting for it to buckle under its own weight and fall so they could get on with the execution. Kafkor, sucking on the cigarette, became aware of the ash, too. Life itself seemed to ride on it. Defying gravity, defying sense, it grew longer than the unsmoked part of the cigarette.

And then a whisper of wind coming off the river dislodged the ash. Kafkor spit out the butt. “Poshol ty na khuy,” he whispered, carefully articulating each of the O’s in “Poshol.” “Go impale yourself on a prick.” He rocked back on his heels and squinted in the direction of the copse of stunted apple trees on the slope above him. “Look!” he blurted out, vanquishing terror only to confront a new enemy, madness. “Up there!” He sucked in his breath. “I see the elephant. It can be said that the beast is revolting.”

At the Mercedes, the back door on the far side swung open and a frail woman dressed in an ankle-length cloth coat and peasant galoshes stumbled from the car. She wore a black pillbox hat with a thick veil that fell over her eyes, making it difficult for someone who didn’t know her to divine her age. “Jozef ” she shrieked. She stumbled toward the prisoner about to be executed, then, sinking to her knees, she turned to the man in the back of the car. “What if it should begin to snow?” she cried.

The Oligarkh shook his head. “Trust me, Kristyna he will be warmer in the ground if the hole is covered with snow.”

“He is the same as a son to me,” the woman sobbed, her voice fading to a cracked whimper. “We must not bury him before he has had his lunch.”

Still on her knees, the woman, shuddering with sobs, started to crawl through the dirt toward the crater. In the back of the Mercedes, the Oligarkh gestured with a finger. The driver sprang from behind the wheel and, pressing the palm of his hand to the woman’s mouth, half carried, half dragged her back to the car and folded her body into the back seat. Before the door slammed shut she could be heard sobbing: “And if it does not snow, what then?”

Closing his window, the Oligarkh watched the scene unfold through its tinted glass. The two paratroopers took a grip on the prisoner’s arms and lifted him into the crater and set him down on his side, curled up in a fetal position in the round hole. Then they began covering the crater with the thick planks, kicking the ends into the ground so that the tops of the planks were flush with the dirt road. When that was done they dragged a section of metal webbing over the planks. All the while nobody spoke. On the slope the workers, puffing on cigarettes, looked away or stared at their feet.

When the paratroopers finished covering the crater, they backed off to admire their handiwork. One of them waved to the driver of a truck. He climbed behind the wheel and backed up to the crater and worked the lever that elevated the flatbed to spill tarmacadam onto the road. Several workers came over and spread the macadam with long rakes until a thick glistening coating covered the wooden planks and they were no longer visible. They stepped away and the paratroopers signaled for the steamroller. Black fume billowed from its exhaust pipe as the rusty machine lumbered to the edge of the crater. When the driver seemed to hesitate, the horn of the Mercedes sounded and one of the bodyguards standing nearby pumped an arm in irritation. “It is not as if we have all day,” he shouted above the bedlam of the steamroller’s engine. The driver threw it into gear and started across the crater, packing down the tarmacadam. When he reached the other side, he backed over it again and then swung out of the cab to inspect the newly paved patch of highway. Suddenly, he tore off his improvised face mask and, bending, vomited on his shoes.

Barely making a sound, the Mercedes backed and filled and swung past the chase car and started up the dirt spur toward the sprawling wooden dacha at the edge of the village of Prigorodnaia, soon to be connected to the Moscow-Petersburg highway and the world by a ribbon of macadam with a freshly painted white stripe down the middle.

1997: MARTIN ODUM HAS A CHANGE OF HEART

CLAD IN A WASHED OUT WHITE JUMPSUIT AND AN OLD PITH HELMET with mosquito netting hanging from it to protect his head, Martin Odum cautiously approached the rooftop beehives from the blind side so as not to obstruct the flight path of any bees straggling back to the frames. He worked the bellows of his smoker, spewing a fine white cloud into the nearest of the two hives; the smoke alerted the colony to danger, rousing the 20,000 bees inside to gorge themselves on honey, which would calm them down. April really was the crudest month for bees, since it was touch and go whether there would be enough honey left over from the winter to avoid starvation; if the frames inside were too light, he would have to brew up some sugar candy and insert it into the hive to see the queen and her colony through to the warm weather, when the trees in Brower Park would be in bud. Martin reached inside with a bare hand to unstick one of the frames; he had worn gloves when he handled the hives until the day Minh, his occasional mistress who worked in the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor below the pool parlor, informed him that bee stings stimulated your hormones and increased your sex drive. In the two years he had been keeping bees on a Brooklyn rooftop, Martin had been stung often enough but he’d never observed the slightest effect on his hormones; on the other hand the pinpricks seemed to revive memories he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Martin, who had dark hollows under his eyes that didn’t come from lack of sleep, pried the first frame free and gingerly brought it out into the midday sunlight to inspect the combs. Hundreds of worker bees, churring in alarm, clung to the combs, which were depleted but still had enough honey left in them to nourish the colony. He scraped burr comb from the frame and examined it for evidence of American foulbrood. Finding none, he carefully notched the frame back into the hive, then backed away and pulled off the pith helmet and swatted playfully at the handful of brood bees that were trailing after him, looking for vengeance. “Not today, friends,” Martin said with a soft laugh as he retreated into the building and slammed the roof door shut behind him.

Downstairs in the back room of the one-time pool parlor that served as living quarters, Martin stripped off the jumpsuit and, throwing it on the unmade Army cot, fixed himself a whiskey, neat. He selected a Ganaesh Beedie from a thin tin filled with the Indian cigarettes. Lighting up, dragging on the eucalyptus leaves, he settled into the swivel chair with the broken caning that scratched at his back; he’d picked it up for a song at a Crown Heights garage sale the day he’d rented the pool parlor and glued Alan Pinkerton’s unblinking eye on the downstairs street door above the words “Martin Odum Private Detective.” The fumes from the Beedie, which smelled like marijuana, had the same effect on him that smoke had on bees: it made him want to eat. He pried open a tin of sardines and spooned them onto a plate that hadn’t been washed in several days and ate them with a stale slice of pumpernickel he discovered in the icebox, which (he reminded himself) badly needed to be defrosted. With a crust of pumpernickel, he wiped the plate clean and turned it over and used the back as a saucer. It was a habit Dante Pippen had picked up in the untamed tribal badlands of Pakistan near the Khyber Pass; the handful of Americans running agents or operations there would finger rice and fatty mutton off the plate when they had something resembling plates, then flip them over and eat fruit on the back the rare times they came across something resembling fruit. Remembering a detail from the past, however trivial, gave Martin a tinge of satisfaction. Working on the back of the plate, he deftly peeled the skin off a tangerine with a few scalpel-strokes of a small razor sharp knife. “Funny how some things you do, you do them well the first time” he’d allowed to Dr. Treffler during one of their early sessions.

“Such as?”

“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 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. “

“I have a hard time keeping track of your various identities.”

“Me, too. That’s why I’m here. “

“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 possibility 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.”

“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.”

To Martin’s surprise she’d come up with something that could pass for humor. “Changing the names to protect the guilty, too. “

There are other things, Martin thought now (continuing the conversation with Dr. Treffler in his mind), no matter how many times you do them, you don’t seem to do them better. Such as (he went on, anticipating her question) peeling hard-boiled eggs. Such as breaking into cheap hotel rooms to photograph married men having oral sex with prostitutes. Such as conveying to a Company-cleared shrink the impression that you didn’t have great expectations of working out an identity crisis. Tell me again what you hope to get out of these conversations? he could hear her asking. He supplied the answer he thought she wanted to hear: In theory, I’d like to know which one of my legends is me. He could hear her asking, Why in theorf. He considered this for a moment. Then, shaking his head, he was surprised to hear his own voice responding out loud: “I’m not sure I have a need to know in practice, I might be better able to get on with my dull life if I don’t know.”

Martin would have dragged out the fictitious dialogue with Dr. Treffler, if only to kill time, if he hadn’t heard the door buzzer. He padded in bare feet through the pool parlor, which he’d converted into an office, using one of the two tables as a desk and the other to lay out Lincoln Dittmann’s collection of Civil War firearms. At the top of the dimly lit flight of narrow wooden stairs leading to the street door, he crouched and peered down to see who could be ringing. Through the lettering and Mr. Pinkerton’s private eye logo he could make out a female standing with her back to the door, scrutinizing the traffic on Albany Avenue. Martin waited to see if she would ring again. When she did, he descended to the foyer and opened the two locks and the door.

The woman wore a long raincoat even though the sun was shining and carried a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Her dark hair was pulled back and twined into a braid that plunged down her spine to the hollow of her back the spot where Martin had worn his hand gun (he’d recut the holster’s belt slot to raise the pistol into an old shrapnel wound) in the days when he’d been armed with something more lethal than cynicism. The hem of her raincoat flared above her ankles as she spun around to face him.

“So are you the detective?” she demanded.

Martin scrutinized her the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. She appeared to be in her mid or late thirties guessing the ages of women had never been his strong suit. Spidery wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her eyes, which were fixed in a faint but permanent squint. On her thin lips was what from a distance might have passed for a ghost of a smile; up close it looked like an expression of stifled exasperation. She wore no makeup as far as he could see; there was the faint aroma of a rose-based perfume that seemed to come from under the collar on the back of her neck. She might have been taken for handsome if it hadn’t been for the chipped front tooth.

“In this incarnation,” he finally said, “I’m supposed to be a detective.”

“Does that mean you’ve had other incarnations?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “So are you going to invite me in or what?”

Martin stepped aside and gestured with his chin toward the steps. The woman hesitated as if she were calculating whether someone living over a Chinese restaurant could really be a professional detective. She must have decided she had nothing to lose because she took a deep breath and, turning sideways and sucking in her chest, edged past him and started up the stairs. When she reached the pool parlor she looked back to watch him emerging from the shadows of the staircase. She noticed he favored his left leg as he walked.