Legends (44 page)

“How could you be sure it was Lincoln?”

“The person who came into my office was quite different from the Martin Odum I know. When I realized I was confronting Lincoln Dittmann and said so, he came clean.”

“Cut to the chase. Is Martin Odum off his rocker? Should we commit him to an institution?”

“You can have it either way, Mrs. Quest. Lincoln Dittmann is certainly off his rocker, as you put it. He’s convinced he was present at the battle of Fredericksburg during the Civil War. Say the word and I can get a dozen doctors to certify he’s clinically insane. If you wanted to, you could have Lincoln Dittmann or his alter ego, the Irishman Dante Pippen committed indefinitely.”

“What about Martin Odum?”

“Martin is distressed by his inability to figure out which of the three working identities is the real him. But he functions reasonably well, he is quite capable of making a living, offending for himself, perhaps even of having a relationship with a woman as long as she is able to live with the ambiguity at the heart of his persona.”

“In short, nobody who meets Martin in a bar or at a dinner party would think he was mentally deranged?”

Dr. Treffler nodded carefully. “As long as he is unable to dredge up the details of the original childhood trauma, he will remain in this state of suspended animation functional enough to muddle through, vaguely anguished.”

“Okay. I want you to drop this case. I’ll send my man Tripp around to your clinic to collect any and all notes you might have made during the sessions. I don’t need to remind you that the whole affair is classified top secret and not to be discussed with a living soul.”

Dr. Treffler remembered something she’d told Martin at one of their early sessions. “Even if I change the names to protect the guilty?”

“This is not a laughing matter, Dr. Treffler.” Crystal Quest stabbed at a button on the console. “Tripp will see you to the lobby. Appreciate your coming by.”

“That’s it?”

Mrs. Quest heaved herself out of the wicker chair. “That’s definitely it,” she agreed.

Dr. Treffler rose to her feet and stood facing her, her eyes bright with discovery. “You never wanted me to identify the trauma. You don’t want Martin to get well.”

Quest sniffed at the scent of perfume in the windowless cubbyhole; it startled her to realize that Bernice Treffler’s professional psyche reeked of femaleness, which was more than she could say for herself. “You’re in over your head,” the Deputy Director of Operations testily informed her visitor. “In Martin’s case, getting well could turn out to be fatal.”

1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THE KATOVSKY GAMBIT

STEPPING OFF THE CURB IN FRONT OF THE CROWDED AIRPORT terminal, Martin raised an index finger belt high to flag down one of the freelancers cruising the area in search of customers who didn’t want to deal with the doctored meters on the licensed cabs. Within seconds an antique Zil pulled to a stop in front of him and the passenger window wound down.

“Kuda,” demanded the driver, an elderly gentleman wearing a thin tie and a checkered jacket with wide lapels, along with a pair of rimmed eyeglasses that were the height of fashion during the Soviet era.

“Do you speak English?” Martin asked.

“Nyet, nyet, nye govoryu po-Angliiski,” the driver insisted, and then began to speak pidgin English with obvious relish. “Which whereabouts are you coming to, comrade visitor?” he asked.

“A village not far from Moscow named Prigorodnaia. Ever hear of it?”

The driver rocked his head from side to side. “Everyone over fifty knows where is Prigorodnaia,” he announced. “You have been there before?”

“No. Never.”

“Well, it’s not stubborn to find. Direction Petersburg, off the Moscow-Petersburg highway. Big shots once owned dachas there but they are all late and lamented. Only little shots still live in Prigorodnaia.”

“That’s me,” Martin said with a tired grin. “A little shot. How much?”

“Around trip, one hundred dollars U.S.” half now, half when you resume to Moscow.”

Martin settled onto the seat next to the driver and produced two twenties and a ten which was what Dante Pippen had paid the Alawite prostitute Djamillah in Beirut several legends back. Then, popping another aspirin from the jar he’d bought at the airport pharmacy to dull the pain from the cracked rib, he watched as the driver piloted the Zil through rush-hour traffic toward Moscow.

After a time Martin said, “You look a little old to be freelancing as a taxi.”

“I am one miserable pensioner,” the driver explained. “The automobile belongs to my first wife’s youngest son, who was my stepson before I divorced his mother. He was one of those smart capitalists who bought up industry privatization coupons distributed to the proletarian public, and then turned around and sold them for an overweight profit to the new Russian mafioso. Which is how he became owner of an old but lovingly restored Zil automobile. He borrows it to me when the ridiculous rent on my privatized apartment needs to get paid at the start of the month.”

“What did you do before you retired?”

The driver looked quickly at his passenger out of the corner of an eye. “Believe it or not, no skin off my elbow if you don’t, I was a famous, even infamous, chess grand master ranked twenty-third in Soviet Union in 1954 when I was a nineteen-year-old Komsomol champion.”

“Why infamous?”

“It was said of me that chess drove me mad as a hatter. The critics who said it did not comprehend that, as a chess-playing psychologist once pointed out, chess cannot drive people mad; chess is what keeps mad people sane. You don’t by any chance play chess?”

“As a matter of fact, I used to. I don’t get much of a chance anymore.”

“You have heard maybe of the Katovsky gambit?”

“Actually, that rings a bell.”

“It’s me, the bell that’s ringing,” the driver said excitedly. “Hippolyte Katovsky in the flesh and blood. My gambit was the talk of tournaments when I played abroad Belgrade, Paris, London, Milan,

once even Miami in the state of Caroline the North, another time Peking when the Chinese Peoples Republic was still a socialist ally and Mao Tse-tung a comrade in arms.”

Martin noticed the old man’s eyes brimming with nostalgia. “What exactly was the Katovsky gambit?” he inquired.

Katovsky leaned angrily on the horn when a taxi edged in ahead of him. “Under Soviets, drivers like that would have been sent to harvest cotton in Central Asia. Russia is not the same since our communists lost power. Ha! We gained the freedom to die of hunger. The Katovsky gambit involved offering a poisoned pawn and positioning both bishops on the queens side to control the diagonals while knights penetrate on the king’s side. Swept opponents away for two years until R. Fischer beat me in Reykjavik by ignoring the poisoned pawn and castling on the queen’s side after I positioned my bishops.”

His lips moving as he played out a gambit in his head, Katovsky fell silent and Martin didn’t interrupt the game. The Zil passed an enormous billboard advertising Marlboro cigarettes and metro stations disgorging swarms of workers. Fatigue overcame Martin (he’d been traveling for two days and two nights to get from Hrodna to Moscow) and he closed his eyes for a moment that stretched into twenty minutes. When he opened them again the Zil was on the ring road. Giant cranes filled what Martin could see of the skyline. New buildings with glass facades that reflected the structures across the street were shooting up on both sides of the wide artery. In one of them he could make out automobiles barreling by, but there were so many of them on the road he couldn’t be sure which one was his. Traffic slowed to a crawl where men in yellow hard hats were digging up a section of the roadway with jackhammers, then sped up again as the Zil spilled through the funnel. Up ahead an overhead sign indicated the junction for the Petersburg highway.

“Turnoff for Prigorodnaia very shortly now,” Katovsky said. “I was one of Boris Spassky’s advisors when he lost to Fischer in 1972. If only he would have followed my advice he could have vacuumed the carpet with Fischer, who made blunder after blunder. Ha! They say the winner in any game of chess is the one who makes the next to last blunder. Here here is the Prigorodnaia turnoff. Oh, how time seeps through your fingers when you are not closing your hand into a fist

I remember this road before it was paved. In 1952 and part of 1953, I was driven by a chauffeur to Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s dacha in Prigorodnaia every Sunday to teach chess to his wife. The lessons came to an end when Comrade Stalin died and Beria, who behind Stalin’s back created the gulags and purged the most loyal comrades, became executed.”

As Katovsky headed down the spur, past a sign that read “Prigorodnaia 7 kilometers,” the cracked rib in Martin’s chest began to ache again. Curiously, the pain seemed… familiar.

But how in the name of God could pain be familiar?

A pulse, the harbinger of a splitting headache, began to beat in Martins temples and he brought his fingers up to knead his brow. He found himself slipping into and out of roles. He could hear Lincoln Dittmann lazily murmuring a verse of poetry. . 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.

And the voice of the poet wearing the soiled white shirt open at the throat.

Sight at daybreak, in camp in front of the hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,)

each with a blanket spread over him

Other voices, barely audible, played in the lobe of his brain where memory resided. Gradually he began to distinguish fragments of dialogue.

Gentlemen and ladies… overlooked Martin Odum’s original biography.

His mother was . was Polish… Immigrated… after the Second..

.

Maggies on to .… staring us in the face…

The driver of the Zil glanced at his passenger. “Look at those chimneys spewing filthy white smoke,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s a paper factory built after Beria’s time, unnecessary to say he never would have permitted it. Now you are knowing why only little shots live here nowadays the stench of sulfur fills the air every hour of every day of every year. The local peasants swear you get used to it that in time you only feel discomfort able when you breathe air that is not putrid.”

Even the reek of sulfur stinging Martin’s nostrils seemed familiar.

“Comrade Beria played chess,” the driver remembered. “Badly. So badly that it required all my cleverness to lose to him.” . Lincoln Dittmann was in Triple… overheard an old lottery vender talking Polish to a hooker… catch the drift.… his mother used to read him bedtime stories in Polish…

Martin found himself breathing with difficulty he felt as if he were gagging on memories that needed to be disgorged before he could get on with his life.

Ahead, an abandoned customs station with a faded red star painted above the door loomed at the side of the road. Across from it and down a shallow slope, a river rippled through its bed. It must have been in flood because there appeared to be a margin of shallow marshes on either side; grass could be seen undulating in the current.

Martin heard a voice he recognized as his own say aloud, “The river is called the Lesnia, which is the name of the woods it meanders through as it skirts Prigorodnaia.”

Katovsky slowed the Zil. “I thought you said me you never been to Prigorodnaia.”

“Never. No.”

“Explain, then, how you come to know the name of the river?”

Martin, concentrating on the voices in his head, didn’t reply.

He aced Russian at college… speaking it with a Polish accent. . bringing his Polish up to snuff, they could also work on his Russian.

“Pull over,” Martin ordered.

Katovsky braked the car to a stop, two wheels on the tarmac, two wheels on the soft shoulder. Martin jumped from the car and started walking down the middle of the paved road toward Prigorodnaia. Off to his left, high on the slope near a copse of stunted apple trees, he could see a line of whitewashed beehives. His game leg and broken ribs ached, the migraine lurking behind his brow throbbed as he made his way across a landscape that seemed painfully familiar even though he had never set eyes on it. . Jozefas a first name?

Half of Poland is named Jozef. . precisely the point… I happen to be rereading Kafka…

suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.

Martin detected an unevenness in the tarmac under his feet and, looking down, saw that a section of roadway, roughly the size of a large tractor tire, had been crudely repaved. It had been smoothed over, but the surface was lumpy and the seam was clearly visible. Gaping at the round section of road, he suddenly felt dizzy he sank onto his knees and looked over his shoulder at the Zil drawing closer to him. His eyes widened in terror as he felt himself being transported back in time through a mustard-thick haze of memory. He saw things he recognized but his brain, befuddled with chemicals released by fear, could no longer locate the words to describe them: the twin stacks spewing plumes of dirty white smoke, the abandoned custom’s station with a faded red star painted above the door, the line of whitewashed beehives on a slope near a copse of stunted apple trees. And then, vanquishing terror only to confront a new enemy, madness, he could have sworn he saw an elephant striding over the brow of the hill.

The old man driving the Zil was standing alongside the car, one hand on the open door, calling plaintively to his passenger. “I could have crushed Beria every time,” he explained, “but I thought I would live longer if I came in second.”

The voices in Martin’s skull grew louder. . studied Kafka at the Janiellonian University in Krakow. . worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz. . job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow… contact with the DDO target without too much difficulty.

Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out…

Martin, his facial muscles contorting, heard himself whisper, “Poshol ty na khuy.” He articulated each of the O’s in “Poshol.” “Go impale yourself on a prick.”

Pushing himself to his feet, feeling as if he were trapped in a terrible dream, Martin stumbled down the paved spur toward Prigorodnaia. Could he have met Samat before? He had a vision of himself leaning on the bar of a posh watering hole on Bolshaya