Legends

“Good-bye,” Lincoln said. Although his heart wasn’t in it he forced himself to smile back at her.

1997: MARTIN ODUM IS MESMERIZED TO TEARS

THE JETLINER ELBOWED THROUGH THE TOWERING CLOUDS AND emerged into an airspace as cheerless as sky gets without sun. Dark pitted fields ribbed with irrigation gutters unfurled under the belly of the plane. From his window seat, Martin Odum watched Prague tilt up in its oval frame as if it were perched on the high end of a teeterboard. In his mind’s eye he imagined the buildings yielding to gravity and sliding downslope into the Vltava, the broad mud-colored river meandering through the center of the city that looked, to Martin’s jaundiced eye, like a beautiful woman who had been tempted by a face lift too many. The plane’s wing dipped and Prague leveled out and the hills rimming the bowl of the city swam into view on the horizon, with the prefabricated Communist-era high rise apartment boxes spilling over the crests into the bleak countryside. A moment later the tarmac rushed up to graze the wheels of the plane. “Welcome to Prague,” announced a recorded voice over the public-address system. “We hope your flight has been enjoyable. The captain and his crew thank you for flying Czech Airlines.”

“You’re definitely welcome,” Martin heard himself respond. The buxom English woman in the next seat must have heard him too, because she favored him with a look reserved for passengers having conversations with recorded announcements. Martin felt obliged to decipher his remark. “Any airline that gets me where I’m going in one piece has my unstinting gratitude,” he informed her.

“If you are frightened of flying,” she retorted, “you should entertain the idea of traveling by train.”

“Frightened of trains, too,” Martin said gloomily. He thought of the Italian girl Paura that Lincoln Dittmann had come across in Foz do Iguaçú, the one who was afraid of her shadow. He wondered what had become of her. To this day he wasn’t one-hundred percent sure the woman Lincoln had accosted on the Janicular and the call girl in Brazil were one and the same person. There had been a physical resemblance, so Lincoln had claimed, but the two women had been a world apart in mood and manner. “Frightened of arriving at places I haven’t been to before,” Martin told his neighbor now. “Frightened of motion and movement, frightened of the going and the getting there.”

The English woman was eager to put an end to the exchange and formulated a cutting remark that would accomplish it. But she decided she might be dealing with an authentic maniac after all and kept her mouth shut.

Making his way through the crowded terminal following the overhead signs with images of busses on them, a thin Beedie glued to his lower lip, Martin found his path blocked by a slight young man with an ironic grimace pasted on his fleshy lips. He was dressed in khaki jodhpurs that buttoned at the ankles and a green Tyrolean jacket with tarnished brass buttons. For an instant Martin thought he had been spotted by the local constabulary, but the young man quickly made it clear he was freelancing. “Mister, no difference if you are come to Praha for business or pleasure, in both conditions you will be requiring a fixer whose honorarium will be conspicuously less than what you would find yourself expending on hotels and transportation and meals if you do not accept to employ my services.” The young man, anxious to please, doffed his deerstalker and, pinching one of the two visors between a thumb and two fingers, held it over his solar plexus. “Radek at your beck and call for an insignificant thirty crowns an hour, which translates into one lousy U.S. dollar.”

Martin was tempted. “What made you pick me?” he wanted to know.

“You look reasonably U.S. and I need to varnish my English for the year-end examinations that must be passed with floating colors to arrive into medical school.”

“Flying colors, not floating colors.”

The young man beamed. “Flying colors it will be from this second in time until Alzheimer’s sets in.”

Martin knew himself to be a poor judge of age, but Radek looked a little old to be thinking of going to medical school, and he said so.

“I am a late blossomer,” the young man said with a disarming grin.