Legends

1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN FEELS THE RECOIL IN HIS SHOULDER BLADES

THE SANCTUM LINCOLN HAD SUSSED OUT WAS AS SUITABLE AS A sniper’s blind gets. Most of the panes were missing from the window, which meant he could steady the Whitworth on a sash at shoulder height—Lincoln shot best standing up, with his left elbow braced against a rib. The window itself was covered with a canopy of ivy that had spread across the facade of the abandoned hospital across the street and slightly uphill from the U-shaped tenement at 621 Crown Street, off Albany Avenue. For a sharpshooter, weather conditions—it was sunny and cold—were ideal; humid air could slow down a bullet and cause it to drop, dry hot air could cause it to fire high. Lugging the rifle and a shopping bag up the stairs littered with broken glass and trash to the corner room on the fourth floor, Lincoln had removed the thick work gloves and coated all of his finger tips with Super Glue, then set out the bottles of drinking water, the Mars bars and the containers of liquid yogurts on a sheet of newspaper. He knotted Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk scarf around his neck before sighting in the Whitworth. He judged the distance from the front door of the hospital to the sidewalk in front of the tenement to be eighty yards, then calculated his height above ground and the length of the hypotenuse of the resulting triangle. He adjusted the small wheels on the rear of the brass telescopic sight atop the Whitworth, focusing on the crucifix hanging in a ground floor window giving out onto the street. Sighted correctly and fired with a firm arm, the hexagonal barrel of the Whitworth—rifled to spit out a .45-caliber hex-shaped lead bullet that made one complete turn every twenty yards—could hit anything the marksman could see. Queen Victoria herself had once gotten a bull’s eye at four-hundred yards; she’d been so thrilled with the exploit that she had knighted Mr. Whitworth, the rifle’s inventor, on the spot. Lincoln tapped home the ramrod, working the hand-rolled cartridge into the barrel, then carefully fitted the primer cap over the rifle’s nipple. Finally he removed the brass tampon on the barrel and stretched a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from dust and moisture. With his weapon ready to fire, Lincoln crouched at the sill to study the target building across the street from what had once been the Carson C. Peck Memorial Hospital.

Lincoln had made use of one of Martin Odum’s old tricks to find the address that corresponded to the unlisted phone number 718-555-9291. He’d called the local telephone company from a booth on Eastern Parkway. A woman had come on the line. Like Martin in London, Lincoln had retrieved Dante Pippen’s rusty Irish accent for the occasion.

“Could you tell me, then, how I can get my hands on a new phone book after my dog chewed the bejesus out of the old one?”

“What type of directory do you want, sir?”

“Yellow pages for Brooklyn.”

“We’ll be glad to send it to you. Could I trouble you for your phone number?”

“You’re not troubling me,” Lincoln had said. “It’s 718-555-9291.”

The woman had repeated the number to be sure she had it right. Then she’d asked, “What kind of dog do you have?”

“An Irish setter, of course.”

“Well, hide the phone book from him next time. Will you be needing anything else today?”

“A new yellow pages will do me fine. Are you sure you know where to send it?”

The woman had said, “Let me check the screen. Here it is. You’re at 621 Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York, right?”

“That’s it, darlin’.”

“Have a nice day.”

“I plan to,” Lincoln had said just before he hung up.

From his hideaway on the fourth floor of the abandoned and soon to be demolished hospital, Lincoln watched a black teenager balancing a ghetto blaster on one shoulder skate past 621 Crown Street. As dusk shrouded the neighborhood and the streetlights flickered on, what Lincoln took to be a group of Nicaraguans in dreadlocks and colorful bandannas piled out of a gypsy cab and filed into the building. Settling down to camp for the night, Lincoln examined the building across the street more closely through the scope on the rifle. All the windows on the first five floors had cheap shades, some of them drawn, some of them half raised; the people he caught glimpses of in the windows looked to be Puerto Ricans or blacks. The entire top floor appeared to have been taken over by the target; every window was fitted with venetian blinds, all but one tightly closed. The one where he could see through the slats turned out to be a kitchen, equipped with an enormous Frigidaire and a gas stove with a double oven. A stocky black woman wearing an apron appeared to be preparing dinner. Now and then men would wander through the kitchen; one of them had his sports jacket off and Lincoln could make out a large-caliber pistol tucked into a shoulder holster. The black woman opened the oven to baste a large bird, then prepared two enormous bowls of dog food. She seemed to shout to someone in another room as she set the bowls down on the floor. A moment later two Borzois romped into sight and were promptly lost to view under the sill of the window.

Cleaning away the debris, settling down on the floor with his back against a wall, Lincoln treated himself to a Mars bar and half a container of yogurt. All things considered, he was relieved that he was the one doing the shooting and not Martin Odum. Marksmanship was not Martin’s strong suit; he was too impatient to stalk a target and crank in one or two clicks on the sights for distance and windage and slowly squeeze (as opposed to jerk) the trigger; too cerebral to kill in cold blood unless he was goaded into action by the likes of Lincoln Dittmann or Dante Pippen. In short, Martin was too involved, too temperamental. When a born-again sniper like Lincoln shot at a human target, the only thing he felt was the recoil of the rifle. Staking out the target, taking your sweet time to be sure you got the kill, one shot to a target, Lincoln was in his element. He had owned a rifle since he was a child in Pennsylvania, hunting rabbits and birds in the woods and fields behind his house in Jonestown. Once, packed off to the Company’s Farm for a refresher course in hand-to-hand combat and firearms, he’d impressed the instructors the first day on the firing range when they’d put an antiquated gas-operated semiautomatic M-l in his hands. Without a word, Lincoln had screwed down the iron sights and fired off a round at the thirty-six-inch target hoping to spot a spurt of dirt somewhere in front of it. When he did he’d turned up the sights one click, which was the equivalent of one minute of elevation or ten inches of height on the target, and fired the second round into the black. He’d notched in a one-click windage adjustment and raised his sights and hit the bulls eye on the third try.

The cold set in with the darkness. Lincoln turned up the collar of Martin Odum’s overcoat and, drawing it tightly around his body, dozed. Images of soldiers outfitted in white headbands charging a stone wall along a sunken road filled his brain; he could hear the spurt of cannon and the crackle of rifle fire as smoke and death drifted over the field of battle. He forced himself awake to check the luminous hands on his wristwatch and the building across the street. Falling into a fitful sleep again, he found himself transported to a more serene setting. Skinny girls in filmy dresses were slotting coins into a jukebox and swaying in each others arms to the strains of Don’t Worry, Be Happy. The music faded and Lincoln found himself inhaling the negative ions from a fountain on the Janicular, one of Rome’s seven hills. An elegantly dressed woman and a dwarf wearing a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to his neck were walking past. Lincoln could hear himself saying, My name’s Dittmann. We met in Brazil, in a border town called Foz do Iguaçú. Your daytime name was Lucia, your nighttime name was Paura. He made out the woman’s excited response: I remember you! Your daytime name happens to be the same as your nighttime name, which is Giovanni da Varrazano.

In his fiction Lincoln caught up with the woman as she continued on down the hill. He gripped her shoulders and shook her until she agreed to spend the rest of her life breeding baby polyesters with him on a farm in Tuscany.

Checking the building across the street again, Lincoln became aware of the first faint ocherous stains tinting the grim sky over the roofs in the east. Setting up the kill had been easier than he’d expected. He’d made his way through the alleyways behind Albany Avenue to the yard in back of Xing’s restaurant. Using an old boat hook hidden behind a rusting refrigerator, he’d tugged down the lower rung of the ladder on the fire escape and climbed up to the roof. The bees had long since abandoned Martin’s two hives, including the one that seemed to have exploded; stains of what looked like dried molasses were visible on the tar paper. Retrieving the key Martin had hidden behind a loose brick on the parapet, Lincoln had unlocked the roof door and let himself into Martin Odum’s pool parlor. He made his way through the dark apartment to the pool table that Martin had used as a desk and took a single handrolled rifle cartridge from the mahogany humidor; Lincoln himself had fabricated the ammunition several years before, procuring high-grade gunpowder and measuring it out on an apothecary scale. Pocketing the cartridge, he picked up the Whitworth and blew the dust off of its firing mechanism. It was a surprisingly light weapon, beautifully crafted, exquisitely balanced, a delight to hold in your hands. This particular Whitworth had originally been his; he couldn’t remember how it had wound up in Martin Odum’s possession. He made a mental note to ask him one of these days. Wiping the weapon clean of fingerprints, he rolled it in one of Martin’s overcoats and slung it across his back. Then, pulling on a pair of thick work gloves he found in a cardboard box, he retraced his steps down to the alley, recovered the shopping bag filled with nourishment that he’d prepared that morning and meandered through the deserted streets of Crown Heights to the massive building with “Carson C. Peck Memorial Hospital” and “1917” engraved on its stone base. Breaking in turned out to be relatively uncomplicated: At the back of the hospital, on the Montgomery Street side, squatters had cut through the chainlink fence the demolition company rigged around the property and one of the ground floor doors was ajar. Crouching inside the building to get his bearings, Lincoln caught the muffled sound of a brassy cough rising from the stairwell, which suggested that the squatters had installed themselves in the basement of the building.

The ocherous streaks had dragged smudges of daylight across the sky, transforming the rooftops into silhouettes. Massaging his arms to work out the coldness and the stiffness, Lincoln pushed himself to his feet and padded over to a corner of the room to relieve himself against a wall. Returning to the window, kneeling at the sill, he noticed a light in the top-floor kitchen window across the street. The black woman, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, was brewing up two large pots of coffee. When the coffee was ready she filled eight mugs and, carrying them on a tray, disappeared from view. Below, at the entrance to 621 Crown, two Nicaraguan women wearing long winter coats and bright scarves and knitted caps pulled down over their earlobes emerged from the building and hurried off in the direction of the subway station on Eastern Parkway. Twelve minutes later a black BMW pulled up to the curb in front of the tenement. The driver, a tall man in a knee-length leather overcoat and a chauffeur’s cap, climbed out and stood leaning against the open door, clouds of vapor streaming from his mouth as he breathed. He glanced at his watch several times and stamped his feet to keep them from growing numb. He checked the number over the entrance of the building against something written on a scrap of paper and seemed reassured when he spotted the two men shouldering through the heavy door of 621 into the street. Both were dressed in double-breasted pea jackets with the collars turned up. The men, obviously bodyguards, greeted the driver with a wave. One of the bodyguards strolled to the corner and looked up and down Albany Avenue. The other walked off several paces to his left and checked out Crown Street. Returning to the BMW, he eyed the windows of the deserted hospital across the street.

The security arrangements were clearly casual; the bodyguards were going through the motions but there was no urgency to their gestures, which is what often happened when the individual being protected has been squirreled away and the people responsible for his safety assumed that potential enemies wouldn’t be able to find his hole. Back at the BMW, the two bodyguards and the driver were making small talk. One of the bodyguards must have detected a signal on his walkie-talkie because he hauled it from a pocket and, looking up at the closed venetian blinds, muttered something into it. Several minutes went by. Then the front door of 621 swung open again and another bodyguard appeared. He was straining to hold back two Borzois attached to long leashes. To the amusement of the men waiting near the BMW, the dogs practically dragged the man into the gutter. Behind him a stubby hunch-shouldered man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses materialized at the front door. He had a cigar clamped between his teeth and walked with the aid of two aluminum crutches, thrusting one hip forward and dragging the leg after it, then repeating the movement with the other hip. He paused for breath when he reached the end of the walkway in front of the building’s entrance. One of the bodyguards opened the back door of the car. In the corner room across the street, Lincoln rose to his feet and in one flowing motion jammed his left elbow into his rib cage as he steadied the rifle on a window sash. Closing his left eye, he pressed his right eye to the telescopic sight and walked up the muzzle of the Whitworth until the cross-hairs were fixed on the target’s forehead immediately above the bridge of his nose. He squeezed the trigger with such painstaking deliberation that the eruption of flame at the breech’s nipple and the bullet rifling out of the barrel and the satisfying recoil of the stock into his shoulder blade all caught him by surprise. Sighting again on the target, he saw blood oozing from a ragged-edged tear in the middle of the man’s forehead. The bodyguards had heard a sound but not yet associated it with gunfire. The one holding open the back door of the car was the first to notice that their charge was collapsing onto the pavement. He leapt forward to catch him under the armpits and, shouting for help, lowered him to the ground.

By the time the bodyguards realized that the man they were protecting had been shot dead, Lincoln, oblivious to the spasms in his game leg, was well on his way to the breach in the chainlink fence.