Legends

“Such as peeling a tangerine. Such as cutting a fuse for plastic explosive long enough to give you time to get out of its killing range. Such as pulling off a brush pass with a cutout in one of Beirut’s crowded souks.”

“What legend were you using in Beirut?”

“Dante Pippen.”

“Wasn’t he the one”—Bernice (they’d been on a first name basis for the last several sessions) had flipped to another page in her loose-leaf notebook—“who was supposed to have been teaching history at a junior college? The one who wrote a book on the Civil War that he printed privately when he couldn’t find a publisher willing to take it on?”

“No, you’re thinking of Lincoln Dittmann, with two t’s and two n’s. Pippen was the Irish dynamiter from Castletownbere who started out as an explosives instructor on the Farm. Later, posing as an IRA dynamiter, he infiltrated a Sicilian Mafia family, the Taliban mullahs in Peshawar, a Hezbollah unit in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. It was this last mission that blew his cover.”

Dr. Treffler nodded as she added a note to the page. “I have a hard time keeping track of your various identities.”

“Me, too. That’s why I’m here.”

She looked up from the loose-leaf notebook. “Are you sure you have identified all of your operational biographies?”

“I’ve identified the ones I remember.”

“Do you have the feeling you might be repressing any?”

“Don’t know. According to your theory, there’s a good chance I’m repressing at least one of them.”

“The literature on the subject more or less agrees—”

“I thought you weren’t convinced that I fit neatly into the literature on the subject.”

Dr. Treffler flashed one of her very rare smiles, which looked like a foreign object on her normally expressionless face. “You are hors genre, Martin, there’s no doubt about it. Nobody in my profession has come across anyone quite like you. It will cause quite a stir when I publish my paper—”

“Changing the names to protect the innocent.”

“Changing the names to protect the guilty, too.”

“You’re getting into the spirit of things, Bernice. The people who pay you for shrinking my head will be very pleased.”

“A psychiatrist doesn’t shrink the patient’s head, Martin. We shrink their problems.”

“I’m relieved to hear it.”

“Tell me more about Lincoln Dittmann.”

“Such as?”

“Anything that comes to mind will do nicely.” When he still hesitated, she said, “Listen, Martin, you can tell me anything you can tell the Director of the CIA.”

“Anything?”

“That’s why you’re in this room. This is a private clinic. The doctors who work here have been cleared to hear state secrets. We get to treat the people who, for one reason or another, need help before returning to civilian life.”

“If you were the Director and I was sitting like this facing you, our knees almost touching—”

Bernice nodded encouragement. “Go on.”

“I’d tell you that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Then I’d tell you that the CIA is an intelligence agency designed by the same committee. And then I’d remind you that in every civilization known to man, the ratio of horses asses to horses has been greater than one.”

“You’re angry.” She jotted something on the loose-leaf page. “It’s perfectly all right to be angry. Don’t be afraid to let it out.”

Martin shrugged. “I thought I was just expressing some healthy cynicism.”

“Lincoln Dittmann,” she said, tugging the conversation back to her question.

“He was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania named Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant who had come to America after World War Two. His father owned a chain of hardware stores, with the main depot in Fredericksburg, on the Virginia side of the Potomac. He wound up spending several months a year in Fredericksburg and took his son with him when the trips fell during school vacations. Lincoln used his free time to scour the battlefield for souvenirs—in those days you could still find rusting bayonets or cannon balls or the barrels of muzzle loading rifles in the fields after a torrential rain. By the time he reached his teens, when the other kids his age were reading Batman comics, Lincoln could recount every detail of the battle of Fredericksburg. At Lincoln’s urging, his father began buying Civil War paraphernalia from the farmers during his turn around the hardware stores—he returned home with rifles and bayonets and powder horns and Federal medals on the backseat of his Studebaker—”

“Not Confederate medals?”

“The Confederates didn’t give medals to their soldiers. When Lincoln went off to college, he already had quite a collection. He even owned a rare English Whitworth, the weapon of choice for Confederate sharpshooters. The paper cartridges were damned expensive but a skilled sniper could hit anything he could see.”

“Where did he go to college?”

“University of Pennsylvania. Majored in American history. Wrote his senior thesis on the battle of Fredericksburg. When he began teaching at the junior college, he turned it into a book.”

“That was the book he printed himself when he couldn’t find a publisher?”