Legends (9 page)
At the time Minh had thought it was one of those things you say to sound clever. Only later did it dawn on her that he’d meant every word; that boring yourself to death was a way of committing suicide in slow motion.
Stepping into the back room, Minh straightened the sheets and blanket on the cot, emptied the water from the plastic basin on the floor, closed the refrigerator door, put away the dishes that Martin had finally gotten around to washing. She retrieved Martin’s faded white jumpsuit and, rolling up the cuffs and the sleeves, slipped into it and zipped up the front. She put on the pith helmet with the mosquito netting hanging from it and took a look at herself in the cracked mirror over the bathroom sink. The outfit was not what you would call feng shui. Taking Martin’s smoke gun from under the sink, she made her way up the stairs to the roof. The sun, high overhead, was burning off the last drops of rain that had fallen the previous night. Vapor rose from shallow puddles as she crossed the roof to the hives. Martin had bought them and the equipment, and even the first queen bees, from a catalogue when he got it into his head to raise bees. In the beginning he had pored over the instruction book that came with the hives. Then he’d dragged a chair up to the roof and had spent hours staring at the colonies, trying to figure out if there was a flight pattern to the swarm’s movements, a method to its apparent madness. Minh had never seen him do anything with such intensity. When he’d begun inspecting and cleaning the frames he’d worn gloves, but he discarded them when Minh happened to mention the Chinese belief that bee stings stimulated your hormones and increased your sex drive. Not that the subsequent stings on his hands had changed anything it was invariably Minh who made the first move toward the cot in the back of the loft, pulling Martin into the room, onto the cot, peeling off her clothing and then his. He made love to her cautiously, as if (she finally realized) he, not she, were fragile; as if he were afraid to let emotions surface that he might not be able control.
Minh was crouching in front of the first hive, preparing the smoker, ruminating on how making love with Martin had been like sleepwalking through a string of one-night stands that were physically satisfying but emotionally frustrating, when the dumdum bullet plunged into the frames. There was an instant of absolute silence, as if the 20,000 residents of the hive those that had survived the impact had been reduced to a state of catatonic bewilderment. Then a raging yellowish-brown football-sized swarm burst out of the hive with such ferocity it knocked Minh over backward. The pith helmet and veil flew off to one side and the bees attacked her nostrils and her eyes, planting their darts with savage vengeance. She clenched her fingers into fists and hammered wildly at the layers of bees en crusting her skin, crushing them by the hundreds until her knuckles were covered with a sticky residue. There was no longer a sun overhead, only a thick carpet of rioting insects ricocheting off one another as they fought for a turn at the intruder who had wrecked their hive.
Her face and lids swelling, Minh slumped back onto the hot tarpaper of the roof, swatting weakly at the bees the way Tsou had whisked at the fly on the bar. As the pain gave way to numbness, she heard a voice that sounded remarkably like her own telling Martin that, hey, you really shouldn’t wear gloves. Sure there’s a reason why. According to the Chinese, bee stings can stimulate your…
1997: OSKAR ALENANDROVICH KASTNER DISCOVERS THE WEIGHT OF A CIGARETTE
THE TWO MEN IN CON-ED UNIFORMS PARKED THEIR REPAIR TRUCK in the narrow alley between President and Carroll and made their way on foot to the only back garden on the block protected by a chain link fence. One of the men muttered something into a walkie-talkie, listened for a response and nodded to his colleague when he heard it. The second man produced a key, opened the door in the fence and used the same key to switch off the alarm box inside. The two, walking soundlessly on crepe soled shoes, climbed the stairs to the porch. Using a second key, they let themselves into the kitchen at the rear of the house and punched the code into the alarm there. They stood motionless for several minutes, their eyes fixed on the ceiling. When they heard the muffled scrape of a wheelchair rolling along a hallway over their heads, the two men produced pistols fitted with silencers and started up the back staircase. Reaching the first floor, they could hear a radio playing in the front room. Gripping their pistols with both hands, angling the barrels up, they worked their way along the hall to the closed door and flattened themselves against the wall on either side of it. One of the men tapped the side of his nose to indicate he had gotten a whiff of foul smelling cigarette smoke; their quarry was inside the room. Baring his teeth in a tight smile, his companion grasped the knob and flung open the door and the two of them, hunched over to keep their profiles low, burst into the room.
Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner, sitting in his wheelchair next to the window, was oiling the firing mechanism on a Soviet PPSh 41, a Second World War automatic weapon in mint condition. Smoke coiled up from a cigarette burning in an ashtray. Kastner’s heavy lidded eyes blinked slowly as he took in the intruders. One appeared much older than the other but the younger man, gesturing to the other to shut the door, seemed to be in charge.
” Vy Russky?” Kastner inquired.
“Da. Ya Russky,” replied the younger Con-Ed man. “I gdye vas ha doctor
Kastner eyed the pearl-handled Tula-Tokarev on the table, a 1930s pistol that he always kept charged, but he knew he could never reach it. ” Ya ne znayu,” he replied. He was not about to tell them that Stella was on her way to Israel, accompanied by a CIA agent turned detective who lived over a Chinese restaurant. He wondered how the two killers had broken through the chain link fence and gotten into the kitchen without tripping the alarms. “You took your time getting here,” Kastner growled in English. “Nine years.” He set the PPSh down and, working the joystick, maneuvered the wheelchair so that his back was to the intruders.
“Kto vasposlati” he asked.
“Oligarkh,” the younger gunman said with a ruthless snicker.
Gazing out the window, Kastner caught sight of two small Lubavitch boys, dressed in black like their fathers, hurrying down the street. He knew from Elena that they expected the Messiah to appear at any moment and redeem mankind. Maybe this Messiah had turned up and the boys were actually angels on their way to welcome him. He himself would surely end up where angels fear to tread, as that song Stella played on the Victrola put it. Kastner gasped when he felt the needle prick the skin of his back next to the shoulder blade. In his day the KGB specialists in wet work had favored a tasteless, colorless rat poison that thinned the blood and brought breathing to an abrupt halt. The Oligarktis hit men would surely be using something more sophisticated and less traceable; perhaps one of those newfangled adrenalin-like substances that caused widespread gastric bleeding and, eventually, death, or, better still, a clotting agent that blocked a coronary artery and triggered what doctors called a myocardial infarction and laymen referred to as a heart attack. On the off-chance that one of the angels might ask him to identify himself, Kastner tried to recollect what his name had been before the FBI assigned the pseudonym
Oskar. It irritated him that he was unable to remember what his mother had called him as a child. If he could suck on his cigarette, it would surely calm his nerves long enough for the name to come back to him. Moving languidly, as if he were underwater, Kastner reached for the ashtray. With great concentration he managed to pinch the cigarette between his thumb and two fingers, only to discover that it was too heavy to lift.
1987: DANTE PIP PEN BECOMES AN IRA BOMBER
ASSEMBLED IN A WINDOWLESS STORAGE ROOM IN A BASEMENT OF Langley filled with empty water coolers the eight people around the conference table started, as always, with the family name and in short order narrowed the list down to one that had an Irish ring to it, but then spent the next half hour debating how it should be spelled. In the end the chairman, a station chief who reported directly to Crystal Quest, the new Deputy Director of Operations, turned to the agent known as Martin Odum, who had been following the discussion from a chair tilted back against the wall; as Martin’s “Odum” legend had been burned and he would be the person employing the new identity, it would save time if he settled on the spelling. Without a moment’s hesitation, Martin opted for Pippen with three p’s. “I’ve been reading newspaper stories about a young black basketball player at the University of Central Arkansas named Scottie Pippen,” Martin explained. “So I thought Pippen would have the advantage of being easy to remember.”
“Pippen it is,” announced the chairman and he turned to the selection of a Christian name to go with Pippen. The junior member of the Legend Committee, a Yale-educated aversion therapist, sarcastically suggested that they might want to go whole hog and use Scottie as the Christian name. Maggie Poole, who had read medieval French history as an Oxford undergraduate and liked to salt her conversation with French words, shook her head. “You’re all going to think I am off the wall but I came up with a name in my dreams last night that I consider parfait. Dante, as in Dante Alighieri?” She looked around the table expectantly.
The only other woman on the committee, a lexicographer on loan from the University of Chicago, groaned. “Problem with Dante Pippen,” she said, “is it wouldn’t go unnoticed. People tend to remember a name like that.”
“But don’t you see, that’s exactly what makes it an excellent choice,” exclaimed Maggie Poole. “Nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pippen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it stands out in a crowd.”
“She has a point,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a gargoyle-like CIA veteran who had started out creating legends for OSS agents during World War Two.
“I will admit I don’t dislike the sound of Dante,” ventured the aversion therapist.
The chairman looked at Martin. “What do you think?” he asked.
Martin repeated the names several times. Dante. Dante Pippen. “Uh-huh. I think it suits me. I can live with Dante Pippen.”
Once the committee had decided on a name, the rest of the cover story fell neatly into place.
“Our Dante Pippen is obviously Irish, born, say, in County Cork.”
“Where in County Cork?”
“I once vacationed in a seaport called Castletownbere,” said the aversion therapist.
“Castletownbere, Cork, has a good ring to it. We’ll send him there for a week of R and R. He can get a local map and the phone book, and fix in his head the names of the streets and hotels and stores.”
“Castletownbere is a fishing port. He would have worked on a salmon trawler as a teenager.”
“Then when the economy turned bad, he would have gone off to try his luck in the New World, where he will have picked up a lot about the history of the Irish in America the potato famine of 1840 that brought the first Irish immigrants to our shores, the Civil War draft riots, that sort of thing.”
“If he comes from Castletownbere, he must be Catholic. For the price of a generous donation, we can probably get the local Castletownbere church to slip his name into its baptism records.”
“One fine day, like many, if not most, Irish men, he would have become fed up with the church.”
“A lapsed Catholic, then,” said the chairman, jotting the biographical detail down on his yellow pad.
“A very lapsed Catholic,” Martin piped up from his place along the wall.
“Just because he’s lapsed doesn’t mean his family will have lapsed.”
“Why don’t we give him a brother and a sister who are in the church but can’t be traced because they are no longer living under the name Pippen. Brother such and such. Sister such and such.”
“The brother could be a Jesuit priest in the Congo, converting the natives to Jesus at the bitter end of some crocodile infested river.”
“And the sister let’s put her in a convent hospital in the back country of the Ivory Coast.”
“She will have taken a vow of silence.” which means she couldn’t be interviewed even if someone got to her.”
“Is Dante Pippen a smoker or nonsmoker?
The chairman turned to Martin, who said, “I’ve been trying to cut down. If Dante Pippen is supposed to be a nonsmoker, it’ll give me an incentive to go cold turkey.”
“Nonsmoker it is, then.”
“Be careful you don’t put on weight. The CIA takes a dim view of overweight agents.”
“We ought to hire one or two being obese would be a perfect cover.”
“Even if our Dante Pippen’s a lapsed Catholic, he would still have gone to Catholic school as a child. He would have been taught to believe that the seven sacraments Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Confession, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony and Holy Orders could see you through a lifetime of troubles.”
The chairman scribbled another note on his pad. “That’s a good point,” he said. “We’ll get someone to teach him rosaries in Latin he could slip them into the conversation to lend credibility to the new identity.”
“Which brings us to his occupation. What exactly does our Dante Pippen do in life?”
The chairman picked up Martin Odum’s 201 Central Registry folder and extracted the bio file. “Oh, dear, our Martin Odum can be said to be a renaissance man only if one defines renaissance narrowly.
He was born in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and spent the first eight years of his life in a Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown, where his father owned a small factory manufacturing underwear for the U.S. Army during World War Two. After the war the underwear business went bankrupt and the elder Odum moved the family to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to start an electrical appliance business. Crown Heights is where Martin was brought up.”
“Being brought up in Brooklyn is not the most auspicious beginning for a renaissance man, even defined narrowly,” quipped Maggie Poole. She twisted in her seat toward Martin. “I’m not ruffling your feathers, am
I?”
Martin only smiled.
“Yes, well,” the chairman continued, “our man majored in commerce and minored in Russian at a Long Island state college but never seems to have earned a degree. During vacations he climbed the lower alps in the more modest American mountain ranges. At loose ends, he joined the army to see the world and wound up, God knows why, toiling for military intelligence, where he focused on anticommunist dissidents in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Do I have that right, Martin? Ah, here’s something positively intriguing. When he was younger he worked in the private sector with explosives “