Legends

Quest was rolling her head from side to side in satisfaction. “I did, didn’t I. I trained him and ran him and repaired him when he broke and ran him again. Some legends back, when we were playing Martin as Dante Pippen, I remember him coming in from a stint with that Sicilian Mafia family that was offering to sell Sidewinders to the Sinn Féin diehards in Ireland. He had us all in stitches telling us about how the Sicilians left pistols lying around where anybody could pick them up and shoot them. The catch was they were loaded with dummy bullets, which weighed less than real bullets if you took the trouble to heft them in your palm. Dante”—Quest started giggling and had to catch her breath—“Dante wanted us to leave pistols loaded with dummy bullets lying around Langley. He was only half kidding. He said it would be a quick way to separate the street-smart agents from the street-dumb ones.”

“They may still find him if he went to ground in Prague,” observed the chief of staff.

“Dante isn’t in the Czech Republic,” Quest said flatly. “He would have found half a dozen ways of getting across their silly little border.”

“We’ll catch up with him,” the chief of staff promised.

But Quest, her head still bobbing with pleasure, was following her own thoughts. “I love the guy. I really do. What a goddamned shame we have to kill him.”

“I need to get this off my chest,” Stella said, cutting short the small talk. “I’ve never had an erotic phone relationship before.”

“I didn’t realize our conversations were erotic.”

“Well, they are. The fact that you call is erotic. The sound of your voice coming from God knows where is erotic. The silences where neither of us knows quite what to say, yet nobody wants to end the conversation, is endlessly erotic.”

They both listened to the hollow silence. “It is not written that we will ever become lovers,” Martin said finally. “But if we do, we must make love as if each time could be the last.”

His remark took her breath away. After a moment she said, “If we were to make love, I have the feeling time would stop in its tracks, death would cease to exist, God would become superfluous.” She waited for Martin to say something. When he didn’t she plunged on: “It exasperates me that we only just met—I lost so much time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Translate that, please.”

“Time is something you can’t lose,” Martin said. “Memory is another story.”

He listened to her breathing on the other end of the phone four thousand miles away. “Consider the possibility,” he said, “that we can talk intimately because of the distance between us—because the phone provides a measure of safety. Consider the possibility that the intimacy will evaporate when we come face to face.”

“No. No. I don’t think it will; I’m sure it won’t. Listen, before Kastner and I came to America I was in love with a Russian boy, or thought I was. I look back on it now as something that was pleasantly physical, as first loves tend to be, but not erotic. The two are a universe apart. My Russian boy friend and I talked constantly when we weren’t groping each other on some narrow bed in some narrow room. Thinking about it now, I remember endless strings of words that had no spaces between them. I remember conversations that were without silences. You know how you can split an atom and get energy. Well, you can do the same with words. Words contain energy. You can split them and harness the released energy for your love life. Are you still there, Martin? How do you interpret my love affair with the Russian boy?”

“It means you weren’t ready. It means you are now.”

“Ready for what?”

“Ready for naked truths, as opposed to crumbs of truth.”

“Funny you should say that. Do you know Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate? It’s a great Russian novel, one of the greatest, right up there with War and Peace. Somewhere in it Grossman talks about how you can’t live with scraps of truth—he says a scrap of truth is no truth at all.”

Martin said, “I’ve had to make do with scraps—maybe that’s what’s pushing me to find Samat. Maybe somewhere in the Samat story there’s a naked truth.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Not sure.” He laughed under his breath. “Intuition. Instinct. Hope against hope that the king’s horses and the king’s men can somehow put the pieces together again.”

1997: MARTIN ODUM IS ACCUSED OF HIGH AND LOW TREASON

^“LOOK, IF YOU PLEASE, DIRECTLY AHEAD OF US—THERE ARE THE hulls,” Almagul shouted over the din of the ancient Soviet outboard that was powering her eight-meter skiff across the Aral Sea toward Vozrozhdeniye Island. “Ten years ago there was a bay here with the port for Kantubek at the top of it. The ships you see became stranded when the rivers feeding the Aral Sea were diverted and the sea level sank.”