Legends

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 as 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?”

“That’s a strange question. He could cover his head like an Arab—as long as I could see his eyes, I could pick him out of a crowd.”

“What did he do by way of work?”

“If you mean work in the ordinary sense of the term, nothing. He’d bought a new split-level house on the edge of Kiryat Arba for cash, or so the rabbi whispered in my ear as we were walking to the synagogue for the wedding ceremony. He owned a brand new Japanese Honda and paid for everything, at least in front of me, with cash. I stayed in Kiryat Arba for ten days and I came back again two years later for ten days, but I never saw him go to the synagogue to study Torah, or to an office like some of the other men in the settlement. There were two telephones and a fax machine in the house and it seemed as if one of them was always ringing. Some days he’d lock himself in the upstairs bedroom and talk on the phone for hours at a stretch. The few times he talked on the phone in front of me he switched to Armenian.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh what?”

“Sounds like one of those new Russian capitalists you read about in the newspapers. Did your sister have children?”

Stella shook her head. “No. To tell you the awful truth, I’m not positive they ever consummated the marriage.” She slid to the floor and went over to the window to stare out at the street. “The fact is I don’t fault him for leaving her. I don’t think Elena—I never got used to calling her Ya’ara—has the vaguest idea how to please a man. Samat probably ran off with a bleached blonde who gave him more pleasure in bed.”

Martin, listening listlessly, perked up. “You make the same mistake most women make. If he ran off with another woman, it’s because he was able to give her more pleasure in bed.”

Stella turned back to gaze at Martin. Her eyes tightened into a narrower squint. “You don’t talk like a detective.”

“Sure I do. It’s the kind of thing Bogart would have said to convince a client that under the hard boiled exterior resided a sensitive soul.”

“If that’s what you’re trying to do, it’s working.”

“I have a question: Why doesn’t your sister get the local rabbi to testify that her husband ran out on her and divorce him in absentia?”

“That’s the problem,” Stella said. “In Israel a religious woman needs to have a divorce handed down by a religious court before she can go on with her life. The divorce is called a get. Without a get, a Jewish woman remains an agunah, which means a chained woman, unable to remarry under Jewish law; even if she remarries under civil law her children will still be considered bastards. And the only way a woman can obtain a get is for the husband to show up in front of the rabbis of a religious court and agree to the divorce. There’s no other way, at least not for religious people. There are dozens of Hasidic husbands who disappear each year to punish their wives—they go off to America or Europe. Sometimes they live under assumed names. Go find them if you can! Under Jewish law the husband is permitted to live with a woman who’s not his wife, but the wife doesn’t have the same right. She can’t marry again, she can’t live with a man, she can’t have children.”

“Now I’m beginning to see why you need the services of a detective. How long ago did this Samat character skip out on your sister?”

“It’ll be two months next weekend.”

“And it’s only now that you’re trying to hire a detective?”

“We didn’t know for sure he wasn’t coming back until he didn’t come back. Then we wasted time trying the hospitals, the morgues, the American and Russian embassies in Israel, the local police in Kiryat Arba, the national police in Tel Aviv. We even ran an ad in the newspaper offering a reward for information.” She tossed a shoulder. “I’m afraid we don’t have much experience tracking down missing persons.”

“You said earlier that your father and you thought Samat might head for America. What made you decide that?”

“It’s the phone calls. I caught a glimpse once of his monthly phone bill—it was several thousand shekels, which is big enough to put a dent in a normal bank account. I noticed that some of the calls went to the same number in Brooklyn. I recognized the country and area code—1 for America, 718 for Brooklyn—because it’s the same as ours on President Street.”

“You didn’t by any chance copy down the number?”

She shook her head in despair. “It didn’t occur to me …”

“Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t know this Samat character was going to run out on your sister.” He saw her look quickly away. “Or did you?”

“I never thought the marriage would last. I didn’t see him burying himself in Kiryat Arba for the rest of his life. He was too involved in the world, too dynamic, too attractive—”

“You found him attractive?”

“I didn’t say I found him attractive,” she said defensively. “I could see how he might appeal to certain women. But not my sister. She’d never been naked in front of a man in her life. As far as I know she’d never seen a naked man. Even when she saw a fully clothed man she averted her eyes. When Samat looked at a woman he stared straight into her eyes without blinking; he undressed her. He claimed to be a religious Jew but I think now it may have been some kind of cover, a way of getting into Israel, of disappearing into the world of the Hasidim. I never saw him lay tefillin, I never saw him go to the synagogue, I never saw him pray the way religious Jews do four times a day. He didn’t kiss the mezuzah when he came into the house the way my sister did. Elena and Samat lived in different worlds.”

“You have photographs of him?”

“When he disappeared, my sister’s photo album disappeared with him. I have one photo I took the day they were married—I sent it to my father, who framed it and hung it over the mantle.” Retrieving her satchel, she pulled a brown envelope from it and carefully extracted a black and white photograph. She stared at it for a moment, the ghost of an anguished smile deforming her lips, then offered it to Martin.

Martin stepped back and held up his palms. “Did Samat ever touch this?”

She thought a moment. “No. I had the film developed in the German Colony in Jerusalem and mailed it to my father from the post office across the street from the photo shop. Samat didn’t know it existed.”

Martin accepted the photo and tilted it toward the daylight. The bride, a pale and noticeably overweight young woman dressed in white satin with a neck-high bodice, and the groom, wearing a starched white shirt buttoned up to his Adam’s apple and a black suit jacket flung casually over his shoulders, stared impassively into the camera. Martin imagined Stella crying out the Russian equivalent of “Cheese” to pry a smile out of them, but it obviously hadn’t worked; the body language—the bride and groom were standing next to each other but not touching—revealed two strangers at a wake, not a husband and wife after a wedding ceremony. Samat’s face had all but disappeared behind a shaggy black beard and mustache. Only his eyes, storm-dark with anger, were visible. He was obviously irritated, but at what? The religious ceremony that had gone on too long? The prospect of marital bliss in a West Bank oubliette with a consenting Lubavitcher for cellmate?

“How tall is your sister?” Martin inquired.

“Five foot four. Why?”

“He’s slightly taller, which would make him five foot six or seven.”

“Mind if I ask you something?” Stella said.

“Ask, ask,” Martin said impatiently.

“How come you’re not taking notes?”

“There’s no reason to. I’m not taking notes because I’m not taking the case.”

Stella’s heart sank. “For God’s sake, why? My father’s ready to pay you whether you find him or not.”

“I’m not taking the case,” Martin announced, “because it’d be easier to find a needle in a field of haystacks than your sister’s missing husband.”

“You could at least try,” Stella groaned.

“I’d be wasting your father’s money and my time. Look, Russian revolutionaries at the turn of the century grew beards like your sister’s husband. It’s a trick illegals have used since Moses dispatched spies to explore the enemy order of battle at Jericho. You live with the beard long enough, people identify you with the beard. The day you want to disappear, you do what the Russian revolutionaries did—you shave it off. Your own wife couldn’t pick you out of a police lineup afterward. For argument’s sake, let’s say Samat was one of those gangster capitalists you hear so much about these days. Maybe things got too hot for your future ex-brother-in-law in Moscow the year he turned up in Kiryat Arba to marry your half sister. Chechen gangs, working out of that monster of a hotel across from the Kremlin—it’s called the Rossiya, if I remember right—were battling the Slavic Alliance to see who would control the lucrative protection rackets in the capital. There were shootouts every day as the gangs fought over territories. Witnesses to the shootouts were gunned down before they could go to the police. People going to work in the morning discovered men hanging by their necks from lampposts. Maybe Samat is Jewish, maybe he’s an Armenian Apostolic Christian. It doesn’t really matter. He buys a birth certificate certifying his mother is Jewish—they’re a dime a dozen on the black market—and applies to get into Israel. The paperwork can take six or eight months, so to speed things up your brother-in-law has a rabbi arrange a marriage with a female Lubavitcher from Brooklyn. It’s the perfect cover story, the perfect way to disappear from view until the gang wars in Moscow peter out. From his split level safe house in a West Bank settlement, he keeps in touch with his business partners; he buys and sells stocks, he arranges to export Russian raw materials in exchange for Japanese computers or American jeans. And then one bright morning, when things in Russia have calmed down, he decides he’s had enough of his Israeli dungeon. He doesn’t want his wife or the rabbis or the state of Israel asking him where he’s going, or looking him up when he gets there, so he grabs his wife’s photo album and shaves off his beard and, slipping out of Israel, disappears from the face of the planet earth.”

Stella’s lips parted as she listened to Martin’s scenario. “How do you know so much about Russia and the gang wars?”

He shrugged. “If I told you I’m not sure how I know these things, would you believe me?”

“No.”

Martin retrieved her raincoat from the banister. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.”

“I didn’t waste it,” she said quietly. “I know more now than when I came in.” She accepted the raincoat and fitted her arms into the sleeves and pulled it tightly around her body against the emotional gusts that would soon chill her to the bone. Almost as an afterthought, she produced a ballpoint pen from her pocket and, taking his palm, jotted a 718 telephone number on it. “If you change your mind …”

Martin shook his head. “Don’t hold your breath.”

The mountain of dirty dishes in the sink had grown too high even for Martin. His sleeves rolled up to the elbows, he was working his way through the first stack when the telephone sounded in the pool parlor. As usual he took his sweet time answering; in his experience it was the calls you took that complicated your life. When the phone continued ringing, he ambled into the pool room and, drying his hands on his chinos, pinned the receiver to an ear with a shoulder.

“Leave a message if you must,” he intoned.

“Listen up, Dante—” a woman barked.

A splitting headache surged against the backs of Martin’s eye sockets. “You have a wrong number,” he muttered, and hung up.

Almost instantly the telephone rang again. Martin pressed the palm with the phone number written on it to his forehead and stared at the telephone for what seemed like an eternity before deciding to pick it up.

“Dante, Dante, you don’t want to go and hang up on me. Honestly you don’t. It’s not civilized. For God’s sake, I know it’s you.”

“How did you find me?” Martin asked.

The woman on the other end of the line swallowed a laugh. “You’re on the short list of ex-agents we keep track of,” she said. Her voice turned serious. “I’m downstairs, Dante. In a booth at the back of the Chinese restaurant. I’m faint from the monosodium glutamate. Come on down and treat yourself to something from column B on me.”

Martin took a deep breath. “They say that dinosaurs roamed the earth sixty-five million years ago. You’re living proof that some of them are still around.”

“Sticks and stones, Dante. Sticks and stones.” She added, in a tight voice, “A word of advice: You don’t want to not come down. Honestly you don’t.”

The line went dead in his ear.

Moments later Martin found himself passing the window filled with plucked ducks hanging from meat hooks and pushing through the heavy glass door into Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant under the pool parlor. Tsou Xing, who happened to be his landlord, was holding fort as usual on the high stool behind the cash register. He waved his only arm in Martin’s direction. “Hello to you,” the old man called in a high pitched voice. “You want to eat in or take out, huh?”

“I’m meeting someone …” He surveyed the dozen or so clients in the long narrow restaurant and saw Crystal Quest in a booth near the swinging doors leading to the kitchen. Quest was better known to a generation of CIA hands as Fred because of an uncanny resemblance to Fred Astaire; a story had once made the rounds claiming that the president of the United States, spotting her at an intelligence briefing in the Oval Office, had passed a note to an aide demanding to know why a drag queen was representing the CIA. Now Quest, a past master of tradecraft, had positioned herself with her back to the tables, facing a mirror in which she could keep track of who came and went. She watched Martin approach in the mirror.

“You look fit as a flea, Dante,” she said as he slid onto the banquette facing her. “What’s your secret?”

“I sprang for a rowing machine,” he said.

“How many hours do you put in a day?”

“One in the morning before breakfast. One in the middle of the night when I wake up in a cold sweat.”

“Why would someone with a clean conscience wake up in a cold sweat? Don’t tell me you’re still brooding over the death of that whore in Beirut, for God’s sake.”

Martin brought a hand up to his brow, which continued to throb. “I think of her sometimes but that’s not what’s bothering me. If I knew what was waking me up, maybe I’d sleep through the night.”

Fred, a lean woman who had risen through the ranks to become the CIA’s first female Deputy Director of Operations, was wearing one of her famous pantsuits with wide lapels and a dress shirt with frills down the front. Her hair, as usual, was cropped short and dyed the color of rust to conceal the gray streaks that came to topsiders who worried themselves sick, so Fred always claimed, over Standard Operating Procedure: Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

“What’s your pleasure, Dante?” Fred asked, pushing aside a half eaten dinner, fingering her frozen daiquiri, noisily crunching chips of ice between her teeth as she regarded her guest through bloodshot eyes.

Martin signaled with a chopstick and then worked it back and forth between his fingers. At the bar, Tsou Xing poured him a whiskey, neat. A slim young Chinese waitress with a tight skirt slit up one thigh brought it over.

Martin said, “Thanks, Minh.”

“You ought to eat something, Martin,” the waitress said. She noticed him toying with the chopstick. “Chinese say man with one chopstick die of starvation.”

Smiling, he dropped the chopstick on the table. “I’ll take an order of Peking duck with me when I leave.”

Fred watched the girl slink away in the mirror. “Now that’s what I call a great ass, Dante. You getting any?”

“What about you, Fred?” he asked pleasantly. “People still screwing you?”

“They try,” she retorted, her facial muscles drawn into a tight smile, “in both senses of the word. But nobody succeeds.”

Snickering, Martin extracted a Beedie from the tin and lit it with one of the restaurant’s matchbooks on the table. “You didn’t say how you found me.”

“I didn’t, did I? It’s more a case of we never lost you. When you washed up like a chunk of jetsam over a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, alarums, not to mention excursions, sounded in the battleship-gray halls of the shop. We obtained a copy of the lease the day you signed it. Mind you, nobody was surprised to find you’d slipped into the Martin Odum legend. What could be more logical? He’d actually been raised on Eastern Parkway, he went to PS 167, Crown Heights was his stamping ground, his father had an electric appliance store on Kingston Avenue. Martin even had a school chum whose father owned the Chinese restaurant on Albany Avenue. Martin Odum was the legend you worked up on my watch, or have you misplaced that little detail? Now that I think of it, you were the last agent I personally ran before they kicked me upstairs to run the officers who ran the agents, although, even at one remove, I always considered that I was the person playing you. Funny part is I have no memory of Odum being a detective. You must have decided the legend needed embroidering.”

Martin assumed that they had bugged the pool parlor. “Being a detective beats having to work for a living.”

“What kind of cases do you get?”

“Mahjongg debts. Angry wives who pay me for photographs of errant husbands caught in the act. Hasidic fathers who think their sons may be dating girls who don’t keep kosher. Once I was hired by the family of a Russian who died in Little Odessa, which is the part of Brooklyn where most of the Russians who wind up in America live, because they were convinced the Chechens who ran the neighborhood crematorium were extracting gold teeth from the late lamented before cremating their bodies. Another time I was hired by a colorful Little Odessa political figure to bring back the Rottweiler that’d been kidnapped by his ex-wife when he fell behind on alimony payments.”

“You get a lot of work in Little Odessa.”

“I keep nodding when my clients can’t come up with the right word in English and wind up speaking Russian to me. They seem to think I understand them.”

“Did you find the dog?”

“Martin Odum always gets his dog.”

She clanked glasses with him. “Here’s looking at you, Dante.” She sipped her daiquiri and eyed him over the rim of the glass. “You don’t by any chance do missing husbands?”

The question hung in the air between them. Martin sucked on his Beedie for a moment, then said, very casually, “What makes you ask?”

She drummed a forefinger against the side of her Fred Astaire nose. “Don’t play Trivial Pursuit with me, Pippen.”

“Up to now I’ve steered clear of missing husbands.”

“What about as of now?”

Martin decided that his apartment wasn’t bugged after all; if it had been, Fred would have known he’d turned down Stella Kastner. “Missing husbands are not my cup of tea, mainly because ninety-nine times out of a hundred they have settled comfortably into new identities involving new women. And it is extremely difficult, as in statistically impossible, to find people who have their heart set on never returning to their old women.”

A weight seemed to lift from Fred’s padded shoulders. She scooped another cube of ice from her daiquiri and ate it. “I have a soft spot for you, Dante. Honestly I do. In the eighties, in the early nineties, you were legendary for your legends. People still talk about you, though they refer to you by different names, depending on when they knew you. ‘What’s old Lincoln Dittmann up to these days?’ a topsider asked me just last week. Agents like you come along once or twice a war. You floated on a cloud of false identities and false backgrounds that you could reel off, complete with what zodiac signs and which relatives were buried in what cemetery. If I remember correctly, Dante Pippen was a lapsed Catholic—he could recite rosaries in Latin that he’d learned as an altar boy in County Cork, he had a brother who was a Jesuit priest in the Congo and a sister who worked in a convent-hospital in the Ivory Coast. There was the Lincoln Dittmann legend, where you’d been raised in Pennsylvania and taught history at a junior college. It was filled with anecdotes about a high school prom in Scranton that was raided by the police or an uncle Manny in Jonestown who made a small fortune manufacturing underwear for the Army during World War Two. In that incarnation you had visited every Civil War battlefield east of the Mississippi. You lived so many identities in your life you used to say there were times when you forgot which biographical details were real and which were invented. You plunged into your cover stories so deeply, you documented them so thoroughly, you lived them so intently, the disbursing office got confused about what name to use on your paycheck. I’ll tell you a dark secret, Dante: I not only admired your tradecraft, I envied you as a person. Everyone enjoys wearing masks, but the ultimate mask is having alternate identities that you can slip into and out of like a change of clothing—aliases, biographies to go with them, eventually, if you are really good, personalities and languages that go with the biographies.”

With his Beedie, Martin playfully made the sign of the cross in the air. “Ave Maria, Gratia Plena, Dominus Tecumi, Benedicta Tu In Mulieribus.”

Snickering, Fred waved at Xing in the mirror. “Would it be asking too much to get a check?” she called. She smiled sweetly at Martin. “I presume you’ve gotten the message I came all this way to deliver. Steer clear of missing husbands, Dante.”

“Why?”

The question irritated Fred. “Because I am telling you to steer clear, damn it. On the off chance you were to find him, why, we’d have to go back and take a hard look at certain decisions we made concerning you. In the end you turned out to be a rotten apple, Dante.”

He didn’t have the foggiest idea what she was talking about. “Maybe there were lines I couldn’t cross,” he said, trying to keep the conversation going; hoping to discover why he woke up nights in a cold sweat.

“We didn’t hire your conscience, only your brain and your body. And then, one fine day, you stepped out of character—you stepped out of all your characters—and took what in popular idiom is called a moral stand. It slipped your mind that morality comes in a variety of flavors. At Langley, we held a summit. The choices before us were not complicated: We could either terminate your employment or terminate your life.”

“What was the final vote?”

“Would you believe it was fifty-fifty? Mine was the tiebreaker. I came down on the side of those who wanted to terminate your employment, on condition you signed up at one of our private asylums. We needed to be sure—”

Before Fred could finish the sentence, Minh turned up carrying a small saucer with a check folded on it. She set it down between the two. Fred snared it and glanced at the bottom line, then peeled off two tens from a wad of bills and flattened them on the saucer. She weighed them down with a salt cellar. She and Martin sat silently, waiting for the waitress to remove the salt cellar and go off with the money.

“I really did have a soft spot for you,” Fred finally said, shaking her head at a memory.

Martin appeared to be talking to himself. “I needed help remembering,” he murmured. “I didn’t get any.”

“Count your blessings,” Fred shot back. She slid off the banquette and stood up. “Don’t do anything to make me regret my vote, Dante. Hey, good luck with the detecting business. One thing I can’t abide is Chechens who swipe gold teeth before cremating the corpus delicti.”

They were speeding up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway toward La Guardia Airport to catch the shuttle back to Washington when the telephone on the dashboard squawked. The Operations Directorate wallah doubling as a chauffeur snatched it out of the cradle and held it to his ear. “Wait one,” he said and passed the phone over his shoulder to Crystal Quest, dozing against a door in the back.

“Quest,” she said into the receiver.

She straightened in the seat. “Yes, sir, I did. Dante and I go back a long way—I’m sure the fact that I delivered the message in person convinced him we were not playing pickup sticks.” She listened for a moment. Up front the wallah surmised that the tinny bursts resonating from the earpiece were conveying exasperation in both tone and content.

Quest scratched at her scalp through her rust colored hair. “I am definitely not going soft, Director—soft is not my style. I ran him when he was operational. Fact that he came in from the cold, as that English spy writer put it, doesn’t change anything. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still running him. As long as he doesn’t remember what happened—as long as he keeps his nose out of this Samat business—there’s no reason to revisit that decision.” She listened again, then said, coldly, “I take your point about unnecessary risks. If he steps over the fault—”

The man on the other end of the phone finished the sentence for her; the wallah at the wheel could see his boss in the rear view mirror nodding as she took aboard an order.

“Count on it,” Quest said.

The line must have gone dead in her ear—the Director was notorious for ending conversations abruptly—because Quest leaned forward and dropped the telephone onto the passenger seat. Sinking back against the door, staring sightlessly out of the window, she started muttering disjointed phrases. After a while the words began taking on a sense. “Directors come and go,” she could be heard saying. “The ones who wind up in Langley through their ties to the White House aren’t the keepers of the flame—we are. We man the ramparts while the Director busts his balls working the Georgetown dinner circuit. We run the agents who put their lives on the line prowling the edge of empire. And we pay the price. Field agent drinks too much, controlling officer gets a hangover. Field agent turns sour, we curdle. Field agent dies, we break out the sackcloth and ashes and mourn for forty days and forty nights.” Quest sighed for her lost youth, her femaleness gone astray. “None of which,” she continued, her voice turning starchy, “would prevent us from terminating the son of a bitch if it looked as if he might compromise the family’s jewel.”

Martin’s bedside alarm went off an hour before first light. In case Fred had managed to plant a microphone after all, he switched on the radio and turned up the volume to cover his foot falls and the sound of doors closing. Still in his tracksuit, he climbed to the roof and worked the bellows of his smoker, sending the colony of bees in the second of the two hives into a frenzy of gorging on honey. Then he reached into the narrow space between the top of the frames and the top of the hive to extract the small packet wrapped in oilcloth. Back downstairs, Martin opened the refrigerator and stuck a plastic basin under the drip notch. In the faint light that came from the open refrigerator, he unfolded the oilcloth around the packet and spread out the contents on his cot. There were half a dozen American and foreign passports, a French Livret de Famille, three internal passports from East European countries, a collection of laminated driver’s licenses from Ireland and England and several East Coast states, an assortment of lending library and frequent flyer and Social Security cards, some of them brittle with age. He collected the identity papers and distributed them evenly between the cardboard lining and the top of the shabby leather valise with stickers from half a dozen Club Med resorts pasted on it. He filled the valise with shirts and underwear and socks and toilet articles, folded Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk bandanna on top, then changed his clothing, putting on a light three-piece suit and the sturdy rubber soled shoes he’d worn when he and Minh had hiked trails in the Adirondacks the year before. Looking around to see what he’d forgotten, he remembered the bees. He quickly scribbled a note to Tsou Xing asking him to use the spare front door key he’d left in the cash register to check the beehives every other day; if there wasn’t enough honey in the frames to see the bees through until spring, Tsou would know how to brew up sugar candy with the ingredients under the sink and deposit it in the hives.

Carrying the valise and an old but serviceable Burberry, Martin made his way to the roof. He locked the roof door behind him and stashed the key under a loose brick in the parapet. Looking up at the Milky Way, or what you could see of it from a roof in the middle of Brooklyn, he was reminded of the Alawite prostitute Dante had come across in Beirut during one particularly hairy mission. Leaning on the parapet, he surveyed Albany Avenue for a quarter of an hour, watching the darkened windows across the street for the slightest movement of curtains or Venetian blinds or a glimpse of embers glowing on a cigarette. Finding no signs of life, he crossed the roof and studied the alleyway behind the Chinese restaurant. There was motion off to the right where Tsou Xing parked his vintage Packard, but it turned out to be a cat trying to work the lid off a garbage pail. When Martin was sure the coast was clear, he backed down the steel ladder and then carefully descended the fire escape to the first floor. There he untied the rope and lowered the last section to the ground (through runners that he’d greased every few months; for Martin, tradecraft was the nearest thing he had to a religion). He tested the quality of the stillness for another few minutes before letting himself down into Tsou Xing’s backyard heaped with stoves and pressure cookers and refrigerators that could one day be cannibalized for spare parts. He slipped the note for Tsou under the back door of the restaurant, crossed the yard to the alleyway and headed down it until he came to Lincoln Place. Two blocks down Lincoln, on the northeast corner of Schenectady, he ducked into a phone booth that reeked of turpentine. The first faint smudges of metallic gray were visible in the east as he checked the number written on his palm. Feeding a coin into the slot, he dialed it. The phone on the other end rang so many times that Martin began to worry he’d dialed the wrong number. He hung up and double checked the number and dialed again. He started counting how many times it rang and then gave up and just listened to it ring, wondering what to do if nobody answered. He was about to hang up—he would go to ground in a twenty-four hour diner on Kingston Avenue and try again in an hour—when someone finally came on the line.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” a familiar voice demanded.

“I have decided I can’t live without you. If you still want me, I think we can work something out.”

Estelle Kastner caught her breath; she understood he was afraid the conversation was being overheard. “I’d given up on you,” she admitted. “When can you come over?”

He liked her style. “How about now?”

She gave him an address several blocks down President Street between Kingston and Brooklyn. “It’s a big private house. There’s a door around the side—the light over it will be on. I’ll be waiting for you in the vestibule.” On the off chance the phone really was tapped, Estelle added, “I’ve never had a relationship with someone whose sign isn’t compatible with mine. So what are you?”

“Leo.”

“Come on, you’re not a Leo. Leo’s are cock sure of themselves. If I had to guess, I’d say you have the profile of a Capricorn. Capricorns are impulsive, whimsical, stubborn as a mule in the good sense—once you start something, you finish it. Your being a Capricorn suits me fine.” She cleared her throat. “What made you change your mind. About calling?”

She caught Martin’s soft laughter and found the sound curiously comforting. She heard him say, “I didn’t have a change of mind, I had a change of heart.”

“Fools rush in,” she remarked, quoting from an old American song she played over and over on the phonograph, “where angels fear to tread.” She could hear Martin breathing into the phone. Just before she cut the connection, she said, more to herself than to him, “I have a weakness for men who don’t use aftershave.”