Legends Read online

  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 cruelest 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 roof top, 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 theory? 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.

  “What happened to your foot?” she asked.

  “Pinched nerve. Numbness.”

  “In your line of work, isn’t a limp a handicap?”

  “The opposite is true. No one in his right mind would suspect someone with a limp of following him. It’s too obvious.”

  “Still, you ought to have it looked at.”

  “I’ve been seeing a Hasidic acupuncturist and a Haitian herbalist, but I don’t tell one about the other.”

  “Have they helped you?”

  “Uh-huh. One of them has—there’s less numbness now—but I’m not sure which.”

  The ghost of a smile materialized on her lips. “You seem to have a knack for complicating simple things.”

  Martin, with a cold politeness that masked how close he was to losing interest, said, “In my book that beats simplifying complicated things.”

  Depositing her satchel on the floor, the woman slipped out of her raincoat and carefully folded it over the banister. She was wearing running sneakers, tailored trousers with pleats at the waist and a man’s shirt that buttoned from left to right. Martin saw that the three top buttons were open, revealing a triangle of pale skin on her chest. There was no sign of an undergarment. The observation made him suck in his cheeks; it occurred to him that the bee stings might be having some effect after all.

  The woman wheeled away from Martin and wandered into the pool parlor, her eyes taking in the faded green felt on the two old tables, the moving company cartons sealed with masking tape piled in a corner next to the rowing machine, the overhead fan turning with such infinite slowness that it seemed to impart its lethargic rhythm to the space it was ventilating. This was obviously a realm where time slowed down. “You don’t look like someone who smokes cigars,” she ventured when she spotted the mahogany humidor with the built in thermometer on the pool table that served as a desk.

  “I don’t. It’s for fuses.”

  “Fuses as in electricity?”

  “Fuses as in bombs.”

  She opened the lid. “These look like paper shotgun cartridges.”

  “Fuses, paper cartridges need to be kept dry.”

  She threw him an anxious look and went on with her inspection. “You’re not crawling in creature comforts,” she noted, her words drifting back over her shoulder as she took a turn around the wide floor-boards.

  Martin thought of all the safe houses he had lived in, furnished in ancient Danish modern; he suspected the CIA must have bought can openers and juice makers and toilet bowl brushes by the thousands because they were the same in every safe house. And because they were safe houses, none of them had been perfectly safe. “It’s a mistake to possess comfortable things,” he said now. “Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don’t settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.” Flashing a wrinkled smile, he added, “This is especially true for those of us who limp.”

  Looking through the open door into the back room, the woman caught a glimpse of crumpled newspapers around the Army cot. “What’s with all the newspapers on the floor?” she asked.

  Hearing her speak, Martin was reminded how satisfyingly musical an ordinary human voice could be. “I picked up that little trick from The Maltese Falcon—fellow named Thursby kept newspapers around his bed so no one could sneak up on him when he slept.” His patience was wearing thin. “I learned everything I know about being a detective from Humphrey Bogart.”

  The woman came full circle and stopped in front of Martin; she studied his face but couldn’t tell if he was putting her on. She was having second thoughts about hiring someone who had learned the detective business from Hollywood movies. “Is it true detectives were called gumshoes?” she said, eyeing his bare feet. She backed up to the pool table covered with muzzle-loading firearms and powder horns and Union medals pinned to a crimson cushion, trying to figure out what fiction she could come up with that would get her out of there without hurting his feelings. At a loss for words, she absently ran her fingers along the brass telescopic sight on an antique rifle. “My father collects guns from the Great Patriotic War,” she remarked.

  “Uh-huh. That makes your father Russian. In America we call it World War Two. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t touch the weapons.” He added, “That one’s an English Whitworth. It was the rifle of choice of Confederate sharpshooters. The paper cartridges in the humidor are for the Whitworth. During the Civil War Whitworth cartridges were expensive, but a skilled sniper could hit anything he could see with the weapon.”

  “You some sort of Civil War buff?” she asked.

  “My alter ego is,” he said. “Look, we’ve made enough small talk. Bite the bullet, lady. You must have a name.”

  Her left palm drifted up to cover the triangle of skin on her chest. “I’m Estelle Kastner,” she announced. “The precious few friends I have call me Stella.”

  “Who are you?” Martin persisted, quarrying for deeper layers of identity than a name.

  The question startled her; there was clearly more to him than met the eye, which raised the prospect that he might be able to help her after all. “Listen, Martin Odum, there are no shortcuts. You want to find out who I am, you’re going to have to put in time.”

  Martin settled back against the banister. “What is it you hope I can do for you?”

  “I hope you can find my sister’s husband, who’s gone AWOL from his marriage.”

  “Why don’t you try the police? They have a missing person’s bureau that specializes in this sort of thing.”

  “Because the police in question are in Israel. And they have more pressing things to do than hunt for missing husbands.”

  “If your sister’s husband went missing in Israel, why are you looking for him in America?”

  “We think that’s one of the places he might have headed for when he left Israel.”

  “We?”

  “My father, the Russian who calls World War Two the Great Patriotic War.”

  “What are the other places?”

  “My sister’s husband had business associates in Moscow and Uzbekistan. He seems to have been involved in some kind of project in Prague. He had stationary with a London letterhead.”

  “Start at the start,” Martin ordered.

  Stella Kastner hiked herself up on the edge of the pool table that Martin used a
s a desk. “Here’s the story,” she said, crossing her legs at the ankles, toying with the lowest unbuttoned button on her shirt. “My half-sister, Elena, she’s my father’s daughter by his first wife, turned religious and joined the Lubavitch sect here in Crown Heights soon after we immigrated to America, which was in 1988. Several years ago the rabbi came to my father and proposed an arranged marriage with a Russian Lubavitcher who wanted to immigrate to Israel. He didn’t speak Hebrew and was looking for an observant wife who spoke Russian. My father had mixed feelings about Elena leaving Brooklyn, but it was my sister’s dream to live in Israel and she talked him into giving his consent. For reasons that are too complicated to go into, my father wasn’t free to travel so it was me who accompanied Elena when she flew to Israel. We took a sharoot”—she noticed Martin’s frown of confusion—“that’s a communal taxi, we took it to the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba on the West Bank next to Hebron. Elena, who changed her name to Ya’ara when she set foot in Israel, was married an hour and a quarter after the plane landed by the rabbi there, who had emigrated from Crown Heights ten years before.”

  “Tell me about this Russian your sister married sight unseen.”

  “His name was Samat Ugor-Zhilov. He was neither tall nor short but somewhere between the two, and thin despite the fact that he asked for seconds at mealtime and snacked between meals. It must have been his metabolism. He was the high strung type, always on the move. His face looked as if it had been caught in a vise—it was long and thin and mournful—he always managed to look as if he were grieving over the death of a close relative. The pupils of his eyes were seaweed-green, the eyes themselves were utterly devoid of emotion—cold and calculating would be the words I’d use to describe them. He dressed in expensive Italian suits and wore shirts with his initials embroidered on the pocket. I never saw him wearing a tie, not even at his own wedding.”

  “You would recognize him if you saw him again?”