Legends

Carrying the valise and an old but serviceable Burberry, Martin made his way to the roof. He locked the roof door behind him and stashed the key under a loose brick in the parapet. Looking up at the Milky Way, or what you could see of it from a roof in the middle of Brooklyn, he was reminded of the Alawite prostitute Dante had come across in Beirut during one particularly hairy mission. Leaning on the parapet, he surveyed Albany Avenue for a quarter of an hour, watching the darkened windows across the street for the slightest movement of curtains or Venetian blinds or a glimpse of embers glowing on a cigarette. Finding no signs of life, he crossed the roof and studied the alleyway behind the Chinese restaurant. There was motion off to the right where Tsou Xing parked his vintage Packard, but it turned out to be a cat trying to work the lid off a garbage pail. When Martin was sure the coast was clear, he backed down the steel ladder and then carefully descended the fire escape to the first floor. There he untied the rope and lowered the last section to the ground (through runners that he’d greased every few months; for Martin, tradecraft was the nearest thing he had to a religion). He tested the quality of the stillness for another few minutes before letting himself down into Tsou Xing’s backyard heaped with stoves and pressure cookers and refrigerators that could one day be cannibalized for spare parts. He slipped the note for Tsou under the back door of the restaurant, crossed the yard to the alleyway and headed down it until he came to Lincoln Place. Two blocks down Lincoln, on the northeast corner of Schenectady, he ducked into a phone booth that reeked of turpentine. The first faint smudges of metallic gray were visible in the east as he checked the number written on his palm. Feeding a coin into the slot, he dialed it. The phone on the other end rang so many times that Martin began to worry he’d dialed the wrong number. He hung up and double checked the number and dialed again. He started counting how many times it rang and then gave up and just listened to it ring, wondering what to do if nobody answered. He was about to hang up—he would go to ground in a twenty-four hour diner on Kingston Avenue and try again in an hour—when someone finally came on the line.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” a familiar voice demanded.

“I have decided I can’t live without you. If you still want me, I think we can work something out.”

Estelle Kastner caught her breath; she understood he was afraid the conversation was being overheard. “I’d given up on you,” she admitted. “When can you come over?”

He liked her style. “How about now?”

She gave him an address several blocks down President Street between Kingston and Brooklyn. “It’s a big private house. There’s a door around the side—the light over it will be on. I’ll be waiting for you in the vestibule.” On the off chance the phone really was tapped, Estelle added, “I’ve never had a relationship with someone whose sign isn’t compatible with mine. So what are you?”

“Leo.”

“Come on, you’re not a Leo. Leo’s are cock sure of themselves. If I had to guess, I’d say you have the profile of a Capricorn. Capricorns are impulsive, whimsical, stubborn as a mule in the good sense—once you start something, you finish it. Your being a Capricorn suits me fine.” She cleared her throat. “What made you change your mind. About calling?”

She caught Martin’s soft laughter and found the sound curiously comforting. She heard him say, “I didn’t have a change of mind, I had a change of heart.”

“Fools rush in,” she remarked, quoting from an old American song she played over and over on the phonograph, “where angels fear to tread.” She could hear Martin breathing into the phone. Just before she cut the connection, she said, more to herself than to him, “I have a weakness for men who don’t use aftershave.”

1994: MARTIN ODUM GETS ON WITH HIS LIVES

^“COULD YOU SAY SOMETHING SO I CAN CHECK THE VOICE LEVEL?”

“What should I say?”

“Anything that comes into your head.”

“‘… the silent cannons bright as gold rumble lightly over the stones. Silent cannons, soon to cease your silence, soon unlimber’d to begin the red business.’”

“That’s fine. Remember to speak directly into the microphone. All right, here we go. For the record: We’re Thursday, the sixteenth of June, 1994. What follows is a tape recording of my first session with Martin Odum. My name is Bernice Treffler. I’m the director of the psychiatric unit at this private hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. If you want to break at any time, Mr. Odum, wave a hand. What were those lines from, by the way?”

“One of Walter Whitman’s Civil War poems.”

“Any reason you call him Walter instead of Walt?”

“I was under the impression that people who knew him called him Walter.”

“Are you a fan of Whitman’s?”

“Not that I’m aware of. I didn’t know I knew the lines until I said them.”

“Does the Civil War interest you?”