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.