Legends

From his hideaway on the fourth floor of the abandoned and soon to be demolished hospital, Lincoln watched a black teenager balancing a ghetto blaster on one shoulder skate past 621 Crown Street. As dusk shrouded the neighborhood and the streetlights flickered on, what Lincoln took to be a group of Nicaraguans in dreadlocks and colorful bandannas piled out of a gypsy cab and filed into the building. Settling down to camp for the night, Lincoln examined the building across the street more closely through the scope on the rifle. All the windows on the first five floors had cheap shades, some of them drawn, some of them half raised; the people he caught glimpses of in the windows looked to be Puerto Ricans or blacks. The entire top floor appeared to have been taken over by the target; every window was fitted with venetian blinds, all but one tightly closed. The one where he could see through the slats turned out to be a kitchen, equipped with an enormous Frigidaire and a gas stove with a double oven. A stocky black woman wearing an apron appeared to be preparing dinner. Now and then men would wander through the kitchen; one of them had his sports jacket off and Lincoln could make out a large-caliber pistol tucked into a shoulder holster. The black woman opened the oven to baste a large bird, then prepared two enormous bowls of dog food. She seemed to shout to someone in another room as she set the bowls down on the floor. A moment later two Borzois romped into sight and were promptly lost to view under the sill of the window.

Cleaning away the debris, settling down on the floor with his back against a wall, Lincoln treated himself to a Mars bar and half a container of yogurt. All things considered, he was relieved that he was the one doing the shooting and not Martin Odum. Marksmanship was not Martin’s strong suit; he was too impatient to stalk a target and crank in one or two clicks on the sights for distance and windage and slowly squeeze (as opposed to jerk) the trigger; too cerebral to kill in cold blood unless he was goaded into action by the likes of Lincoln Dittmann or Dante Pippen. In short, Martin was too involved, too temperamental. When a born-again sniper like Lincoln shot at a human target, the only thing he felt was the recoil of the rifle. Staking out the target, taking your sweet time to be sure you got the kill, one shot to a target, Lincoln was in his element. He had owned a rifle since he was a child in Pennsylvania, hunting rabbits and birds in the woods and fields behind his house in Jonestown. Once, packed off to the Company’s Farm for a refresher course in hand-to-hand combat and firearms, he’d impressed the instructors the first day on the firing range when they’d put an antiquated gas-operated semiautomatic M-l in his hands. Without a word, Lincoln had screwed down the iron sights and fired off a round at the thirty-six-inch target hoping to spot a spurt of dirt somewhere in front of it. When he did he’d turned up the sights one click, which was the equivalent of one minute of elevation or ten inches of height on the target, and fired the second round into the black. He’d notched in a one-click windage adjustment and raised his sights and hit the bulls eye on the third try.

The cold set in with the darkness. Lincoln turned up the collar of Martin Odum’s overcoat and, drawing it tightly around his body, dozed. Images of soldiers outfitted in white headbands charging a stone wall along a sunken road filled his brain; he could hear the spurt of cannon and the crackle of rifle fire as smoke and death drifted over the field of battle. He forced himself awake to check the luminous hands on his wristwatch and the building across the street. Falling into a fitful sleep again, he found himself transported to a more serene setting. Skinny girls in filmy dresses were slotting coins into a jukebox and swaying in each others arms to the strains of Don’t Worry, Be Happy. The music faded and Lincoln found himself inhaling the negative ions from a fountain on the Janicular, one of Rome’s seven hills. An elegantly dressed woman and a dwarf wearing a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to his neck were walking past. Lincoln could hear himself saying, My name’s Dittmann. We met in Brazil, in a border town called Foz do Iguaçú. Your daytime name was Lucia, your nighttime name was Paura. He made out the woman’s excited response: I remember you! Your daytime name happens to be the same as your nighttime name, which is Giovanni da Varrazano.