“COULD YOU SAY SOMETHING SO I CAN CHECK THE VOICE LEVEL?”
“What should I say?”
“Anything that comes into your head.”
“‘… the silent cannons bright as gold rumble lightly over the stones. Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin the red business.’”
“That’s fine. Remember to speak directly into the microphone. All right, here we go. For the record: We’re Thursday, the sixteenth of June, 1994. What follows is a tape recording of my first session with Martin Odum. My name is Bernice Treffler. I’m the director of the psychiatric unit at this private hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. If you want to break at any time, Mr. Odum, wave a hand. What were those lines from, by the way?”
“One of Walter Whitman’s Civil War poems.”
“Any reason you call him Walter instead of Walt?”
“I was under the impression that people who knew him called him Walter.”
“Are you a fan of Whitman’s?”
“Not that I’m aware of. I didn’t know I knew the lines until I said them.”
“Does the Civil War interest you?”
“It doesn’t interest me, Martin Odum, but it interested—how can I explain this?—it interested someone close to me. In one of my incarnations, I was supposed to have taught a course in a junior college on the Civil War. When we were working up the legend—”
“I’m sorry. The CIA people I’ve treated up to now have all been officers working at Langley. You’re my first actual undercover agent. What is a legend?”
“It’s a fabricated identity. Many Company people use legends, especially when they operate outside the United States.”
“Well, I can see my vocabulary is going to expand talking to you, Mr. Odum. Go on with what you were saying.”
“What was I saying?”
“You were saying something about working up a legend.”
“Uh-huh. Since in my new incarnation I was supposed to be something of an expert on the subject, the person I was becoming had to study the Civil War. He read a dozen books, he visited many of the battlefields, he attended seminars, that sort of thing.”
“He, not you?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Was there a name assigned to this particular, eh, legend?”
“Dittmann, with two t’s and two n’s. Lincoln Dittmann.”
“Do you have a headache, Mr. Odum?”
“I can feel one starting to press against the back of my eyes. Could you crack a window? It’s very stuffy in here … Thanks.”
“Would you like an aspirin?”
“Later, maybe.”
“Do you get headaches often?”
“More or less often.”
“Hmmm. What kind of person was this Lincoln Dittmann?”
“I’m not sure I understand the question.”
“Was he different, say, from you? Different from Martin Odum?”
“That was the whole point—to make him different so he could operate without anyone mistaking him for me or me for him.”
“What could Lincoln Dittmann do that you couldn’t?”
“To begin with, he was an extraordinary marksman, much more skilled than me. He would take his sweet time to be sure he got the kill, one shot to a target. He would crank in corrections for windage and distance and then slowly squeeze (as opposed to jerk) the trigger. I’m too high-strung to kill in cold blood unless I’m goaded into action by the likes of Lincoln. The few times in my life that I aimed at a human target, my mouth went dry, a pulse pounded in my temple, I had to will my trigger finger not to tremble. When a born-again sniper like Lincoln shot at a human target, the only thing he felt was the recoil of the rifle. What else? I was more proficient in tradecraft—I could melt into a crowd when there wasn’t one, so they said. Lincoln stood out in a crowd like a sore thumb. He was obviously more cerebral than me, or my other legend, for that matter. He was a better chess player, not because he was smarter than me, it’s just that I was too impatient, too restless to figure out the implications of any particular gambit, to work out what would happen eight or ten moves down the tube. Lincoln, on the other hand, was blessed with incredible patience. If an assignment required stalking someone, Lincoln was the agent of choice for the job. And then there was the way we each looked at the world.”
“Go on.”
“Martin Odum is a basically edgy individual—there are days when he jumps at his own shadow. He’s afraid to set foot in a place he’s never been to before, he’s apprehensive when he meets someone he doesn’t already know. He lets people—women, especially—come to him. He has a sex drive but he’s just as happy to abstain. When he makes love, he goes about it cautiously. He pays a lot of attention to the woman’s pleasure before he takes his own.”
“And Dittmann?”
“Nothing fazed Lincoln—not his own shadow, not places he hadn’t been to, not people he didn’t already know. It wasn’t a matter of his being fearless; it was more a question of his being addicted to fear, of his requiring a daily fix.”
“What you’re describing is very similar to a split personality.”
“You don’t get it. It’s not a matter of splitting a personality. It’s a matter of creating distinct personalities altogether who … Excuse me but why are you making notes when this is being recorded?”
“The conversation has taken a turn for the fascinating, Mr. Odum. I’m jotting down some initial impressions. Were there other dissimilarities between Dittmann and Odum; between Dittmann and you?”
“Creating a working legend didn’t happen overnight. It took a lot of time and effort. The details were worked out with the help of a team of experts. Odum smokes Beedies, Dittmann smoked Schimelpenicks when he could find them, any thin cigars when he couldn’t. Odum didn’t eat meat, Dittmann loved a good sirloin steak. Odum is a Capricorn, Dittmann didn’t know what his Zodiac sign was and couldn’t have cared less. Odum washes and shaves every day but never uses aftershave lotions. Dittmann washed when he could and doused himself with Vetiver between showers. Odum is a loner; the handful of people who know him joke that he prefers the company of bees to humans, and there’s a grain of truth to that. Dittmann was gregarious; unlike Odum he was a good dancer, he liked night clubs, he was capable of drinking large quantities of cheap alcohol with beer chasers without getting drunk. He did dope, he solved crossword puzzles in ink, he played Parcheesi and Go. When it came to women, he was an unconditional romantic. He had a soft spot for females”—Martin remembered a mission that had taken Lincoln to a town on the Paraguayan side of Three Border—“who were afraid of the darkness when the last light has been drained from the day, afraid of men who removed their belts before they took off their trousers, afraid life on earth would end before dawn tomorrow, afraid it would go on forever.”
“And you—”
“I don’t do dope. I don’t play board games. I don’t do crossword puzzles, even in pencil.”
“So Odum and Dittmann are antipodes? That means—”
“Lincoln Dittmann would know what antipodes means. And in a corner of one lobe of my brain I have access to what he knows.”
“What does this access consist of?”
“You’re not going to believe this.”
“Try me.”
Martin said, very softly, “There are moments when I hear his voice whispering in my ear. That’s how I came up with those Walter Whitman lines.”
“Lincoln Dittmann whispered them to you.”
“Uh-huh. Other times I know what he would do or say if he were in my shoes.”
“I see.”
“What do you see?”
“I see why your employer sent you to us. Hmmm. I’m a bit confused about something. You talk about Lincoln Dittmann in the past tense, as if he doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Lincoln’s as real as me.”
“The way you talk about Martin Odum, it almost seems as if he’s a legend, too. Is he?”