Legends

“Yes, well, in Israel you were passing yourself off as Martin Odum, a ruck of a private detective working out of the New York borough of”—he checked his file card—“Brooklyn. That’s quite inventive, actually. Some nonsense about hunting for a missing husband so his wife could get a religious divorce. It goes without saying, knowing your track record, neither our antenna in Israel nor our Perishables division here in London swallowed the cover story. So what are you hawking this time round, Mr. Dittmann? Used one-owner Kalashnikovs? That Ukrainian-manufactured passive radar system they say can detect Stealth aircraft at five hundred miles distance? Nerve gas masquerading as talcum powder? Seed stock for biological agents that cause cholera or camelpox?”

“None of the above.” Martin smiled innocently. “Search me.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” He touched a button on a console. Martin could hear a buzzer wheeze in the outer office. The young man with the peaches-and-cream complexion and the woman who had been working on the computer terminal entered the room. “Would you be so kind as to give us the key to your valise, Mr. Dittmann,” the woman asked, “and then disrobe.” The black man came around the desk. Martin could see he was the kind who worked out at a gym often enough to hope the man who was supposed to help the police with their inquiries would resist.

Martin glanced at the woman. “I’m the timid type,” he remarked.

“Nothing you ’ave, guv’nor, she ’asn’t seen,” snapped peaches-and-cream in a mock cockney accent.

The two men concentrated on Martin, stripping him to the skin and going over every square inch of his three piece suit, underwear and socks. The Supervisor, Perishables paid particular attention to his shoes, inserting them one at a time into a contraption that projected an X-ray image of the shoe onto a glass plate. The woman emptied the contents of the valise onto the desk and began examining each item. Toothpaste was squeezed out of its tube into a plastic container that had Chinese writing on the side. Cold capsules were split open and inspected. The small container of shaving cream was emptied and then cut in half with a hacksaw. Standing in the middle of the room, stark naked, Martin tried to imagine the anti-British joke that Stella would concoct out of the episode, but he couldn’t come up with a punch line. Stella was surely right when she said he didn’t have a sense of humor. “I suppose you are going to compensate me for property destroyed,” he ventured as he started to pull on his clothing.

The Supervisor, Perishables took the question seriously. “You go ahead and replace the items in question and send us the bill,” he said. “If you address it to Heathrow, Perishables, it should get here, shouldn’t it, lads and ladies? Everyone knows who we are. Mind if I ask how long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”

“No. Ask.”

Supervisor, Perishables didn’t crack a smile. “How long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”

“My name is Odum. Martin Odum. I’m in Britain to tell anti-English jokes that will spread across the country like wildfire and take people’s minds off the drudgery of day-to-day life. I plan to stay as long as folks keep laughing.”

“He’s certainly original,” the black man told his associates.

Peaches-and-cream accompanied Martin down to the arrival hall. “No hurt feelings, I hope, gov’nor,” he said, falling back into his phony cockney accent and trying to sound ironic.