Legends

1990: LINCOLN DITTMANN TAKES ON A LIFE OF HIS OWN

TO THE ABIDING SATISFACTION OF ITS EIGHT SITTING MEMBERS, the Legend Committee had been upgraded from its windowless basement storage space at Langley to a fourth-floor conference room drenched in sunlight. That was the upside. The downside was that the new digs had an impregnable view of the vast outdoor parking lot used by the Company plebeians. (The patricians from the seventh floor, including Crystal Quest, the current Deputy Director of Operations and the Committee’s immediate boss, all rated parking spaces in the underground garage, along with an elevator that whisked them to work without stopping at other floors along the way.) “Can’t have everything,” sighed the former station chief who chaired the Legend Committee the first time he set foot in the room the housekeepers were proposing and looked out one of the windows; he’d been hoping for Virginia countryside, not asphalt. To mask his disappointment he came up with the aphorism that had been engraved over the door to the inner sanctum when he presided over Cairo Station oh so many years ago: “Yom asal, yom basal … One day honey, one day onions.”

“Where the heck are we?” he was asking Maggie Poole, who had specialized in medieval French history at Oxford and had never entirely lost her acquired British accent, an affectation particularly remarkable when she slipped French words into the conversation.

“We’re on the fourth étage,” she replied now, purposefully misunderstanding the question to get his goat. “Up here the water coolers are in the corridor outside the rooms, not inside.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, that’s not what I meant and you know it. You do that every occasion you can.”

“Moi?” Maggie Poole blurted out innocently. “Certainly not.”

“What he’s asking,” said the Yale-educated aversion therapist, “is where are we up to with the new legend for Dante Pippen.”

Dante, sitting with his spine against a soft pillow to relieve the pressure on the shrapnel wound in his lower back, thought of these sessions as indoor sport. It was a painless way to pass an afternoon even if his game leg and the back wound ached more or less round the clock. He closed his eyes to shield them from the bright sunlight slanting through the open Venetian blinds and relished the warmth on the skin of his face. “I thought this time around,” he offered, and he could almost hear the bones creaking as the ancient mariners of the Legend Committee craned their necks to stare at him, “we could begin in Pennsylvania.”

“Why Pennsylvania?” demanded the lexicographer on loan from University of Chicago and happy to be; the per diem the Company deposited in his bank account somehow never got reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

The committee’s doyen, a CIA veteran who began his professional career creating legends for the OSS agents during World War Two and never let anyone forget it, fitted on a pair of perfectly round wire spectacles and flipped open the original Martin Odum 201 Central Registry folder. “Pennsylvania,” he observed, straining to make out the small type on the bio file, “seems as good a place to start as any. Mr. Pippen’s predecessor, Martin Odum, spent the first eight years of his life in Pennsylvania, in a small town called Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant, his father ran a small factory producing underwear for the U.S. Army.”

“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 that 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.”