Legends

1992: HOW LINCOLN DITTMANN CAME TO GO TO LANGUAGE SCHOOL

^“GENTLEMEN AND LADIES,” DECLARED THE FORMER STATION CHIEF who chaired the Legend Committee, rapping his knuckles on the oval table to encourage his charges to simmer down, “I invite your attention to a remarkable detail that we seem to have overlooked in Martin Odum’s biography.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked the Yale-educated aversion therapist. “His mother was—”

“She was Polish, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Maggie Poole, speaking, as always, with more than a trace of the British accent that had rubbed off on her at Oxford. She added brightly, “His mother immigrated to les Etats Unis after the Second World War.”

“We are on to something,” said the only other woman on the committee, a lexicographer on permanent loan from the University of Chicago. “I simply can’t believe we missed this.”

“The detail has been staring us in the face every time we worked up a cover story for him,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a grizzly CIA fossil who had begun his long and illustrious career devising false identities for OSS agents during World War Two. He looked at the chairman and asked, “What started you thinking along these lines?”

“When Lincoln Dittmann returned home from Triple Border,” the chairman said, “the subsequent action report mentioned that he’d overheard an old lottery vender talking Polish to a hooker in a bar and discovered he could catch the drift of what they were saying.”

“That’s because his mother used to read him bedtime stories in Polish when they were living in that Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown,” the aversion therapist explained impatiently.

“Mon Dieu, six months of intensive tutoring and he’ll talk Polish like a native,” said Maggie Poole.

“Which is not how you talk American English,” quipped the aversion therapist.

“You can’t resist, can you, Troy?”

“Oh, dear, resist what?” he asked, looking around innocently.

The chairman rapped his knuckles on the table again. “Given what the Deputy Director of Operations has in mind for Lincoln,” he said, “he really ought to speak Russian, too.”

“Martin Odum studied Russian at college,” the lexicographer noted. “Not surprisingly, he wound up speaking it with a Polish accent.”

“While the tutors are bringing his Polish up to snuff,” Maggie Poole suggested, “they could also work on his Russian.”

“Okay, let’s summarize,” said the chairman. “What we have is a Polish national who, like most Poles, speaks fluent Russian. What we need now is a name.”

“Let’s be simple for once.”

“Easier said than done. Le simple nest pas le facile.”

“What about using Franz-Jozef as a first name?”

“Are we being inspired by the Emperor of Austria or Haydn?”

“Either, or.”

“What about just plain Jozef,” offered Maggie Poole.

“Half of Poland is named Jozef.”

“That’s precisely the point, it seems to me,” she retorted.

“That’s not what you argued when we settled on the name Dante Pippen. You said nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pippen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it was so unusual.”

Maggie Poole would not be put off. “Consistency,” she said huffily, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative. That’s Oscar Wilde, in case you’re wondering.”

“I happen to be rereading Kafka’s Amerika.”

“For God’s sake, you’re not going to suggest Kafka as a family name.”

“I was going to suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.”

“Kafkor, Jozef. Not half bad. It’s short and sweet, an easy handle to slip into, I should think. What do you think, Lincoln?”

Lincoln Dittmann, gazing out the window of the fourth floor conference room at the hundreds of cars in the Langley parking lot, turned back toward the members of the Legend Committee. “A variation on the name of Kafka—Kafkor—seems appropriate enough.”

“What on earth do you mean by appropriate?”

“Kafka wrote stories about anguished individuals struggling to survive a nightmarish world, which was more or less how the principal of this new legend would see himself.”

“You’ve obviously read Kafka,” Maggie Poole said.

“He could have read into Kafka at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,” someone noted.

“He could have worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.”

“Through our contacts in Warsaw, we could land him a job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow. From there he ought to be able to make contact with the DDO target without attracting too much attention to himself.”

“Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out when he’s in Moscow.”

“That’s Crystal Quest’s bailiwick,” Lincoln remarked.