“Yes, I remember now,” Martin said finally. Through the panes of the window and the green metal mesh (put there to keep clients from jumping?) he could make out a bit of Maryland countryside; could see the last brown leaves clinging to the branches of trees. He felt an instinctive admiration for their tenacity. “It’s always intrigued me,” he continued because she expected him to; because she sat there with her legs crossed and her thigh visible and her Mont Blanc fountain pen poised over the loose-leaf page. “It struck me as funny how some things you do, you do them well the first time.”
“Such as?” she inquired in a voice so toneless it betrayed absolutely no curiosity about the answer.
“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”—Bernice (they’d been on a first name basis for the last several sessions) had flipped to another page in her loose-leaf notebook—“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.”
Dr. Treffler nodded as she added a note to the page. “I have a hard time keeping track of your various identities.”
“Me, too. That’s why I’m here.”
She looked up from the loose-leaf notebook. “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 good chance 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.”
Dr. Treffler flashed one of her very rare smiles, which looked like a foreign object on her normally expressionless face. “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.”
“Changing the names to protect the guilty, too.”
“You’re getting into the spirit of things, Bernice. The people who pay you for shrinking my head will be very pleased.”
“A psychiatrist doesn’t shrink the patient’s head, Martin. We shrink their problems.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“Tell me more about Lincoln Dittmann.”
“Such as?”
“Anything that comes to mind will do nicely.” When he still hesitated, she said, “Listen, Martin, you can tell me anything you can tell the Director of the CIA.”
“Anything?”
“That’s why you’re in this room. This is a private clinic. The doctors who work here have been cleared to hear state secrets. We get to treat the people who, for one reason or another, need help before returning to civilian life.”
“If you were the Director and I was sitting like this facing you, our knees almost touching—”
Bernice nodded encouragement. “Go on.”
“I’d tell you that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Then I’d tell you that the CIA is an intelligence agency designed by the same committee. And then I’d remind you that in every civilization known to man, the ratio of horses asses to horses has been greater than one.”
“You’re angry.” She jotted something on the loose-leaf page. “It’s perfectly all right to be angry. Don’t be afraid to let it out.”
Martin shrugged. “I thought I was just expressing some healthy cynicism.”
“Lincoln Dittmann,” she said, tugging the conversation back to her question.
“He was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania named Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant who had come to America after World War Two. His father owned a chain of hardware stores, with the main depot in Fredericksburg, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. He wound up spending several months a year in Fredericksburg and took his son with him when the trips fell during school vacations. Lincoln used his free time to scour the battlefield for souvenirs—in those days you could still find rusting bayonets or cannon balls or the barrels of muzzle loading rifles in the fields after a torrential rain. By the time he reached his teens, when the other kids his age were reading Batman comics, Lincoln could recount every detail of the battle of Fredericksburg. At Lincoln’s urging, his father began buying Civil War paraphernalia from the farmers during his turn around the hardware stores—he returned home with rifles and bayonets and powder horns and Federal medals on the backseat of his Studebaker—”
“Not Confederate medals?”
“The Confederates didn’t give medals to their soldiers. When Lincoln went off to college, he already had quite a collection. He even owned a rare English Whitworth, the weapon of choice for Confederate sharpshooters. The paper cartridges were damned expensive but a skilled sniper could hit anything he could see.”
“Where did he go to college?”
“University of Pennsylvania. Majored in American history. Wrote his senior thesis on the battle of Fredericksburg. When he began teaching at the junior college, he turned it into a book.”
“That was the book he printed himself when he couldn’t find a publisher?”
“It was a bitter disappointment to him, not finding a legitimate publisher.”
“What was it about Fredericksburg that was so special?”
Martin’s hand, clammy with perspiration, came up to massage his brow. The involuntary gesture wasn’t lost on Dr. Treffler. “It was early in December of 1862,” he began, staring vacantly out of the window at the horizon, watching for the flashes of the great battle being fought beyond it. “There was a new Federal general in charge of the Army of the Potomac, his name was Burnside. Ambrose Burnside. He thought he saw a way to end the war with one swift assault across Virginia to capture the Confederate capitol, Richmond. It was a brilliant plan. President Lincoln signed off on it and Burnside force-marched his troops down the Potomac to a point across the river from Fredericksburg. If he could surprise the rebels and take the city, the road to Richmond would be open and the war would end almost before it got going. Burnside had put in an urgent order for pontoon bridges, but when he reached Fredericksburg he discovered that the War Department hadn’t dispatched them. The Union army wound up bivouacking for ten days on its side of the river waiting for the Goddamn bridges, giving Robert Lee time to bring up his army and mass it on the heights above the city. When the bridges finally arrived and Burnside crossed the river, he found Bobby Lee and seventy-five thousand Confederates blocking the road to Richmond. The weather was wintry, the autumnal mud in the rutted roads had turned hard. The Federals, advancing across sloping open ground, came on all day, wave after wave of them in their spanking bright factory-made uniforms. The Rebels in homespun dyed with plant pigments, fighting from behind a low stone wall at the edge of a sunken road at the foot of Marye’s Hill, beat back every attack. The sharpshooters, armed with Whitworths, picked off the Federal officers so easily that many of them began tearing off their insignias as they went into the line. Groups of Federals tried to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. Burnside kept track of the progress of the fighting from the roof of the Chatham Mansion across the river. From a knob up on the heights, the Mansion was within eyeshot and Bobby Lee pointed it out to Stonewall Jackson—he told him that thirty years before he’d courted the lady he wound up marrying at that very house. On the ridge line, a Confederate band belted out waltzes for the southern gentlemen and ladies who had come down from Richmond to see the battle. Old Pete Longstreet, with a woman’s woolen shawl draped over his shoulders, watched the fighting unfolding below him through a long glass fixed to a wooden tripod in front of the Confederate command post. It took a time to convince him that the Federal attack on the sunken road wasn’t a feint—he couldn’t swallow the idea that Burnside was squandering his life’s blood in a frontal attack that had no chance of succeeding. At one point an Irish Brigade made it to within fifteen paces of the sunken road and even the Rebels watching from the heights cheered their courage. But the 24th Georgians behind the low stone wall, firing and loading and firing so steadily their teeth ached from biting off the paper cartridges, turned back that attack, too. Burnside launched fourteen assaults on the heights before darkness blotted out the killing fields. When the Federals finally retreated across the river the next day and counted noses, they discovered that nine thousand Union men had fallen at Fredericksburg.”