“Oh, for Pete’s sake, that’s not what I meant and you know it. You do that every occasion you can.”
“Moi?” Maggie Poole blurted out innocently. “Certainly not.”
“What he’s asking,” said the Yale-educated aversion therapist, “is where are we up to with the new legend for Dante Pippen.”
Dante, sitting with his spine against a soft pillow to relieve the pressure on the shrapnel wound in his lower back, thought of these sessions as indoor sport. It was a painless way to pass an afternoon even if his game leg and the back wound ached more or less round the clock. He closed his eyes to shield them from the bright sunlight slanting through the open Venetian blinds and relished the warmth on the skin of his face. “I thought this time around,” he offered, and he could almost hear the bones creaking as the ancient mariners of the Legend Committee craned their necks to stare at him, “we could begin in Pennsylvania.”
“Why Pennsylvania?” demanded the lexicographer on loan from University of Chicago and happy to be; the per diem the Company deposited in his bank account somehow never got reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
The committee’s doyen, a CIA veteran who began his professional career creating legends for the OSS agents during World War Two and never let anyone forget it, fitted on a pair of perfectly round wire spectacles and flipped open the original Martin Odum 201 Central Registry folder. “Pennsylvania,” he observed, straining to make out the small type on the bio file, “seems as good a place to start as any. Mr. Pippen’s predecessor, Martin Odum, spent the first eight years of his life in Pennsylvania, in a small town called Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant, his father ran a small factory producing underwear for the U.S. Army.”
“Jonestown was within driving distance of several Civil War battlefields and Martin wound up going to a bunch of them while he was in grade school,” Dante said from the sideline. “His favorite, which he must have visited two or three times, was Fredericksburg.”
“Could visiting Fredericksburg make someone a Civil War expert?” Maggie Poole inquired eagerly; she had caught a glimpse of where they could be heading.
“Martin was a Fredericksburg expert, for sure,” Dante said with a laugh. His eyes were still tightly closed and he was beginning, once again, to enjoy the business of legend building; it seemed to him the closest he’d ever come to novel writing. “His stories about the battle there were so graphic, people who heard them sometimes jokingly wondered if he’d taken part in the Civil War.”
“Can you give us some examples?” the chairman asked.
“He would describe Bobby Lee, up on Marye’s Hill inland from Fredericksburg, pointing out Burnside’s command post in the Chatham Mansion across the Potomac to Stonewall Jackson and recalling that he’d courted his wife under that roof thirty years before. Martin would describe Old Pete Longstreet, his shoulders draped in a woman’s woolen shawl, watching the battle unfolding below him through a long glass fixed to a wooden tripod and telling everyone within earshot that the Federal attack on the sunken road had to be a feint, that the main attack would come somewhere else.”
The Legend Committee chairman peered at Dante over the rim of his wire eyeglasses. “Was Bobby Lee the General we know as Robert E. Lee?” he asked.
“One and the same,” Dante said from his place along the wall. “The Virginians called him Bobby Lee—though never to his face.”
“Well, this does open avenues for exploration,” the chairman told the others. “Our man may not be a Civil War expert, but with a little help from his friends he could certainly pass for one, couldn’t he?”
“Which brings us to the name,” Maggie Poole said. “And what could be more logique for a Civil War expert than calling him Lincoln?”
“I suppose you were thinking of using Abraham as a first name,” sneered the aversion therapist.
“Va te faire cuire un oeuf,” Maggie Poole shot back. She glared at the aversion therapist, clearly tempted to stick her tongue out at him. “I was thinking along the lines of using Lincoln as a prenom because it would tend to give credibility to a Civil War legend.”
“Lincoln something or other sounds quite elegant to me,” Dante called from the wall.
“Merci, Mr. Pippen, for being so open minded, which is more than I can say for some others in this room,” ventured Maggie Poole.
“I once knew a gun collector in Chicago whose name was Dittmann—that’s with two ‘t’s and two ‘n’s,” said the lexicographer. “There was some suggestion that Dittmann wasn’t his real name but that’s neither here nor there. He specialized in Civil War firearms. His pride and joy was an English sniper rifle, it was called the Whentworth or Whitworth, something like that. As I recall, the paper cartridges were exorbitant, but in the hands of a skilled sharpshooter the rifle was considered to be a lethal weapon.”
“Lincoln Dittmann is a name with … weight,” the chairman decided. “How does it strike you, Mr. Pippen?”
“I could learn to live with it,” he agreed. “And it would certainly be original to turn a field agent into a Civil War expert.”
The members of the Legend Committee knew they had hit pay dirt and the ideas started to come thick and fast.
“He could start building the legend by visiting all the battle grounds.”
“He ought to have a collection personnelle of Civil War firearms, I should think.”
“I like having guns around,” Pippen announced from his seat. “Come to think of it, a personal collection of Civil War weapons would make a great cover for an arms dealer, which is where Fred Astaire is heading with this legend.”
“So we need to think in terms of a legend for an arms dealer?”
“Yes.”
“Who in God’s name is Fred Astaire?”
“It’s Mrs. Quest’s in-house nickname.”
“Oh, dear.”
“In what part of the world would Lincoln Dittmann be operating? Who would be his clients?”
Lincoln had to be careful not to give away family jewels. “His clients would be a hodgepodge of people who are out to hurt America,” he said.
“To step into Lincoln Dittmann’s shoes, you would have to do your homework.”
“Do you mind reading up on a subject, Mr. Pippen?”
“Not at all. Sounds fun to me.”
“He’d need professional credentials.”
“Okay. Let’s summarize. He was raised in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, and visited Fredericksburg so often as a child that he knew the battlefield backward and forward at a time when his young friends were reading Batman comics.”
“His father could have owned a chain of hardware stores with the central depot in Fredericksburg, which meant he would have had to spend a lot of time there in any given year. Nothing would have been more natural than to have taken his young son with him whenever he could
“Of course! He would have taken him along to Fredericksburg during school vacations. The young Lincoln Dittmann would have joined the boys scouring the battlefield for Civil War souvenirs that wash up to the surface after heavy rainfalls.”
“At some point Lincoln would have encouraged his father to hunt for rifles and powder horns and medals when he drove around—let’s give him a Studebaker, which was a popular car after the war—checking on his hardware stores. The local farmers keep these Civil War things in their attics and Lincoln’s father would have brought something back with him after each trip.”
“If I collected medals,” Pippen noted, “they’d all have to be from the Union Army. Confederate Army didn’t award medals.”