Legends

The mountain of dirty dishes in the sink had grown too high even for Martin. His sleeves rolled up to the elbows, he was working his way through the first stack when the telephone sounded in the pool parlor. As usual he took his sweet time answering; in his experience it was the calls you took that complicated your life. When the phone continued ringing, he ambled into the pool room and, drying his hands on his chinos, pinned the receiver to an ear with a shoulder.

“Leave a message if you must,” he intoned.

“Listen up, Dante—” a woman barked.

A splitting headache surged against the backs of Martin’s eye sockets. “You have a wrong number,” he muttered, and hung up.

Almost instantly the telephone rang again. Martin pressed the palm with the phone number written on it to his forehead and stared at the telephone for what seemed like an eternity before deciding to pick it up.

“Dante, Dante, you don’t want to go and hang up on me. Honestly you don’t. It’s not civilized. For God’s sake, I know it’s you.”

“How did you find me?” Martin asked.

The woman on the other end of the line swallowed a laugh. “You’re on the short list of ex-agents we keep track of,” she said. Her voice turned serious. “I’m downstairs, Dante. In a booth at the back of the Chinese restaurant. I’m faint from the monosodium glutamate. Come on down and treat yourself to something from column B on me.”

Martin took a deep breath. “They say that dinosaurs roamed the earth sixty-five million years ago. You’re living proof that some of them are still around.”

“Sticks and stones, Dante. Sticks and stones.” She added, in a tight voice, “A word of advice: You don’t want to not come down. Honestly you don’t.”

The line went dead in his ear.

Moments later Martin found himself passing the window filled with plucked ducks hanging from meat hooks and pushing through the heavy glass door into Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant under the pool parlor. Tsou Xing, who happened to be his landlord, was holding fort as usual on the high stool behind the cash register. He waved his only arm in Martin’s direction. “Hello to you,” the old man called in a high pitched voice. “You want to eat in or take out, huh?”

“I’m meeting someone …” He surveyed the dozen or so clients in the long narrow restaurant and saw Crystal Quest in a booth near the swinging doors leading to the kitchen. Quest was better known to a generation of CIA hands as Fred because of an uncanny resemblance to Fred Astaire; a story had once made the rounds claiming that the president of the United States, spotting her at an intelligence briefing in the Oval Office, had passed a note to an aide demanding to know why a drag queen was representing the CIA. Now Quest, a past master of tradecraft, had positioned herself with her back to the tables, facing a mirror in which she could keep track of who came and went. She watched Martin approach in the mirror.

“You look fit as a flea, Dante,” she said as he slid onto the banquette facing her. “What’s your secret?”

“I sprang for a rowing machine,” he said.

“How many hours do you put in a day?”

“One in the morning before breakfast. One in the middle of the night when I wake up in a cold sweat.”

“Why would someone with a clean conscience wake up in a cold sweat? Don’t tell me you’re still brooding over the death of that whore in Beirut, for God’s sake.”

Martin brought a hand up to his brow, which continued to throb. “I think of her sometimes but that’s not what’s bothering me. If I knew what was waking me up, maybe I’d sleep through the night.”

Fred, a lean woman who had risen through the ranks to become the CIA’s first female Deputy Director of Operations, was wearing one of her famous pantsuits with wide lapels and a dress shirt with frills down the front. Her hair, as usual, was cropped short and dyed the color of rust to conceal the gray streaks that came to topsiders who worried themselves sick, so Fred always claimed, over Standard Operating Procedure: Should you start with a hypothesis and analyze data in a way that supported it, or start with the data and sift through it for a useful hypothesis?

“What’s your pleasure, Dante?” Fred asked, pushing aside a half eaten dinner, fingering her frozen daiquiri, noisily crunching chips of ice between her teeth as she regarded her guest through bloodshot eyes.

Martin signaled with a chopstick and then worked it back and forth between his fingers. At the bar, Tsou Xing poured him a whiskey, neat. A slim young Chinese waitress with a tight skirt slit up one thigh brought it over.

Martin said, “Thanks, Minh.”

“You ought to eat something, Martin,” the waitress said. She noticed him toying with the chopstick. “Chinese say man with one chopstick die of starvation.”

Smiling, he dropped the chopstick on the table. “I’ll take an order of Peking duck with me when I leave.”

Fred watched the girl slink away in the mirror. “Now that’s what I call a great ass, Dante. You getting any?”

“What about you, Fred?” he asked pleasantly. “People still screwing you?”