Legends

“Even if our Dante Pippen’s a lapsed Catholic, he would still have gone to Catholic school as a child. He would have been taught to believe that the seven sacraments—Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Confession, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony and Holy Orders—could see you through a lifetime of troubles.”

The chairman scribbled another note on his pad. “That’s a good point,” he said. “We’ll get someone to teach him rosaries in Latin—he could slip them into the conversation to lend credibility to the new identity.”

“Which brings us to his occupation. What exactly does our Dante Pippen do in life?”

The chairman picked up Martin Odum’s 201 Central Registry folder and extracted the bio file. “Oh, dear, our Martin Odum can be said to be a renaissance man only if one defines renaissance narrowly. He was born in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and spent the first eight years of his life in a Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown, where his father owned a small factory manufacturing underwear for the U.S. Army during World War Two. After the war the underwear business went bankrupt and the elder Odum moved the family to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to start an electrical appliance business. Crown Heights is where Martin was brought up.”

“Being brought up in Brooklyn is not the most auspicious beginning for a renaissance man, even defined narrowly,” quipped Maggie Poole. She twisted in her seat toward Martin. “I’m not ruffling your feathers, am I?”

Martin only smiled.

“Yes, well,” the chairman continued, “our man majored in commerce and minored in Russian at a Long Island state college but never seems to have earned a degree. During vacations he climbed the lower alps in the more modest American mountain ranges. At loose ends, he joined the army to see the world and wound up, God knows why, toiling for military intelligence, where he focused on anticommunist dissidents in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Do I have that right, Martin? Ah, here’s something positively intriguing. When he was younger he worked in the private sector with explosives—”

Maggie Poole turned to Martin. “What précisément did you do with explosives?”

Martin rocked his chair off the wall onto its four legs. “It was a summer job, really. I worked for a construction company demolishing old buildings that were going to be replaced, then blasting through bedrock to make way for the subbasement garages. I was the guy who shouted through a bullhorn for everyone to clear the area.”

“But do you know anything about dynamite?”

“I picked up a bit here and a bit there hanging around the dynamiters. I bought some books and studied the subject. By the end of the summer I had my own blasting license.”

“Did you fabricate dynamite or just light the fuses?”

“Either, or. When I first came to work for the Company,” Martin said, “I spent a month or two making letter bombs, then I got promoted to rigging portable phones so that we could detonate them from a distance. I also worked with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which you know as PETN, an explosive of choice for terrorists. You can mix it with latex to give it plasticity and mold it to fit into anything—a telephone, a radio, a teddy bear, a cigar. You get a big bang out of relatively small amounts of PETN, and in the absence of a detonator, it’s extremely stable. PETN isn’t readily available on the open market but anyone with a blasting license, which Martin Odum has, can obtain the ingredients for roughly twenty dollars the pound. The explosive, incidentally, can pass through any airport X-ray machine in operation today.”

“Well, that opens up some intriguing possibilities,” the chairman informed the others.

“He could have done a stint as an explosive specialist at a shale quarry in Colorado, then been fired for something or other—”

“Stealing PETN and selling it on the open market—”

“Sleeping with the boss’s wife—”

“Homosexualité, even.”

Martin piped up from the wall. “If you don’t mind, I draw the line at having homosexuality in my legend.”

“We’ll figure out why he was fired later. What we have here is an Irish Catholic—”

“Lapsed. Don’t forget he’s lapsed.”

“—a lapsed Irish Catholic who worked with explosives in the private sector.”

“Only to be fired for an as yet undetermined offense.”

“At which point he became a free-lance explosive expert.”

“We may have a problem here,” said the chairman, tapping a fore-finger on one page of Martin Odum’s 201 folder. “Our Martin Odum is circumcised. Dante Pippen, lapsed or not, is an Irish Catholic. How do we explain the fact that he’s circumcised.”