“The detail has been staring us in the face every time we worked up a cover story for him,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a grizzly CIA fossil who had begun his long and illustrious career devising false identities for OSS agents during World War Two. He looked at the chairman and asked, “What started you thinking along these lines?”
“When Lincoln Dittmann returned home from Triple Border,” the chairman said, “the subsequent action report mentioned that he’d overheard an old lottery vender talking Polish to a hooker in a bar and discovered he could catch the drift of what they were saying.”
“That’s because his mother used to read him bedtime stories in Polish when they were living in that Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown,” the aversion therapist explained impatiently.
“Mon Dieu, six months of intensive tutoring and he’ll talk Polish like a native,” said Maggie Poole.
“Which is not how you talk American English,” quipped the aversion therapist.
“You can’t resist, can you, Troy?”
“Oh, dear, resist what?” he asked, looking around innocently.
The chairman rapped his knuckles on the table again. “Given what the Deputy Director of Operations has in mind for Lincoln,” he said, “he really ought to speak Russian, too.”
“Martin Odum studied Russian at college,” the lexicographer noted. “Not surprisingly, he wound up speaking it with a Polish accent.”
“While the tutors are bringing his Polish up to snuff,” Maggie Poole suggested, “they could also work on his Russian.”
“Okay, let’s summarize,” said the chairman. “What we have is a Polish national who, like most Poles, speaks fluent Russian. What we need now is a name.”
“Let’s be simple for once.”
“Easier said than done. Le simple nest pas le facile.”
“What about using Franz-Jozef as a first name?”
“Are we being inspired by the Emperor of Austria or Haydn?”
“Either, or.”
“What about just plain Jozef,” offered Maggie Poole.
“Half of Poland is named Jozef.”
“That’s precisely the point, it seems to me,” she retorted.
“That’s not what you argued when we settled on the name Dante Pippen. You said nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pippen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it was so unusual.”
Maggie Poole would not be put off. “Consistency,” she said huffily, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative. That’s Oscar Wilde, in case you’re wondering.”
“I happen to be rereading Kafka’s Amerika.”
“For God’s sake, you’re not going to suggest Kafka as a family name.”
“I was going to suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.”
“Kafkor, Jozef. Not half bad. It’s short and sweet, an easy handle to slip into, I should think. What do you think, Lincoln?”
Lincoln Dittmann, gazing out the window of the fourth floor conference room at the hundreds of cars in the Langley parking lot, turned back toward the members of the Legend Committee. “A variation on the name of Kafka—Kafkor—seems appropriate enough.”
“What on earth do you mean by appropriate?”
“Kafka wrote stories about anguished individuals struggling to survive a nightmarish world, which was more or less how the principal of this new legend would see himself.”
“You’ve obviously read Kafka,” Maggie Poole said.
“He could have read into Kafka at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,” someone noted.
“He could have worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.”
“Through our contacts in Warsaw, we could land him a job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow. From there he ought to be able to make contact with the DDO target without attracting too much attention to himself.”
“Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out when he’s in Moscow.”
“That’s Crystal Quest’s bailiwick,” Lincoln remarked.
1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS TO INSPECT THE SIBERIAN NIGHT MOTH
THE PHONE ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE HAD RUNG SO MANY times, Martin had given up counting. He decided to let it ring all evening, all night, all the next day if necessary. She had to return home sometime. A woman carrying a sleeping baby on her hip rapped a coin against the glass door of the booth and angrily held up her wrist so that Martin could see the watch on it. Muttering “Find another booth—I bought this one,” he turned his back on her. Shaking her head at how insufferable certain inhabitants of the borough had become, the woman stalked off. In Martin’s ear the phone continued to ring with such regularity that he ceased to be conscious of the sound. His thoughts wandered—he played back what he could remember of the previous phone calls. To his surprise, he was able to recreate her voice in his brain as if he were a skillful ventriloquist. He could hear her saying, When the answers are elusive you have to learn to live with the questions.
It dawned on him that the phone was no longer ringing on the other end of the line. Another human being was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.
“Stella?”
“Martin, is that you?” a voice remarkably like Stella’s demanded.
Martin was surprised when he realized how eager he was to hear that voice; to talk to the one person on earth who was not put off because he wasn’t sure who he was, who seemed ready to live with whatever version of himself he offered up. Suddenly he felt the dead bird stirring in him: He ached to see the night moth tattooed under her breast.
“It’s me, Stella. It’s Martin.”
“Jesus, Martin. Wow. I can’t believe it.”
“I’ve been ringing for hours. Where were you?”
“I met some Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket on Kingston Avenue. They were new immigrants, practically off the boat. I was entertaining them with jokes I used to tell in Moscow when I worked for subsection Marx. You want to hear a great one I just remembered?”
“Uh-huh.” Anything to keep her talking.
She giggled at the punch line before she told the joke. “Okay,” she said, collecting herself. “Three men find themselves in a cell in the Lubyanka prison. After awhile the first prisoner asks the second, ‘What are you here for?’ And the second prisoner says, ‘I was against Popov. What about you?’ And the first prisoner says, ‘I was for Popov.’ The two turn to the third prisoner and ask, “Why were you arrested?’ And he answers, ‘I’m Popov.’”
She became exasperated when Martin didn’t laugh. “When I delivered the punch line at the Moscow Writers Union, people would roll on the floor. Someone in subsection Marx tracked the joke—it spread across Moscow in three days and reached Vladivostok in a week and a half. The Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket actually applauded. And you don’t get it?”
“I get it, Stella. It’s not funny. It’s pathetic. When your joke spread across Russia, people weren’t laughing. They were crying.”
Stella thought about that. “There may be something to what you say. Hey, where are you calling from this time? Murmansk on the Barents Sea? Irkutsk on Lake Baikal?”
“Listen up, Stella. Do you remember the first time I ever phoned you?”
“How could I forget. You called to tell me you didn’t have a change of mind, you had a change of heart. You were phoning from—”
He cut her off. “I was calling from a booth that reeked of turpentine.”
He could hear her catch her breath. “On the corner of—”
He interrupted her again. “Could you find the booth if your life depended on it?”
She said, very calmly, “My life does depend on it.”