Legends

TO THE ABIDING SATISFACTION OF ITS EIGHT SITTING MEMBERS, the Legend Committee had been upgraded from its windowless basement storage space at Langley to a fourth-floor conference room drenched in sunlight. That was the upside. The downside was that the new digs had an impregnable view of the vast outdoor parking lot used by the Company plebeians. (The patricians from the seventh floor, including Crystal Quest, the current Deputy Director of Operations and the Committee’s immediate boss, all rated parking spaces in the underground garage, along with an elevator that whisked them to work without stopping at other floors along the way.) “Can’t have everything,” sighed the former station chief who chaired the Legend Committee the first time he set foot in the room the housekeepers were proposing and looked out one of the windows; he’d been hoping for Virginia countryside, not asphalt. To mask his disappointment he came up with the aphorism that had been engraved over the door to the inner sanctum when he presided over Cairo Station oh so many years ago: “Yom asal, yom basal … One day honey, one day onions.”

“Where the heck are we?” he was asking Maggie Poole, who had specialized in medieval French history at Oxford and had never entirely lost her acquired British accent, an affectation particularly remarkable when she slipped French words into the conversation.

“We’re on the fourth étage,” she replied now, purposefully misunderstanding the question to get his goat. “Up here the water coolers are in the corridor outside the rooms, not inside.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, that’s not what I meant and you know it. You do that every occasion you can.”

“Moi?” Maggie Poole blurted out innocently. “Certainly not.”

“What he’s asking,” said the Yale-educated aversion therapist, “is where are we up to with the new legend for Dante Pippen.”

Dante, sitting with his spine against a soft pillow to relieve the pressure on the shrapnel wound in his lower back, thought of these sessions as indoor sport. It was a painless way to pass an afternoon even if his game leg and the back wound ached more or less round the clock. He closed his eyes to shield them from the bright sunlight slanting through the open Venetian blinds and relished the warmth on the skin of his face. “I thought this time around,” he offered, and he could almost hear the bones creaking as the ancient mariners of the Legend Committee craned their necks to stare at him, “we could begin in Pennsylvania.”

“Why Pennsylvania?” demanded the lexicographer on loan from University of Chicago and happy to be; the per diem the Company deposited in his bank account somehow never got reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

The committee’s doyen, a CIA veteran who began his professional career creating legends for the OSS agents during World War Two and never let anyone forget it, fitted on a pair of perfectly round wire spectacles and flipped open the original Martin Odum 201 Central Registry folder. “Pennsylvania,” he observed, straining to make out the small type on the bio file, “seems as good a place to start as any. Mr. Pippen’s predecessor, Martin Odum, spent the first eight years of his life in Pennsylvania, in a small town called Jonestown. His mother was a Polish immigrant, his father ran a small factory producing underwear for the U.S. Army.”

“Jonestown was within driving distance of several Civil War battlefields and Martin wound up going to a bunch of them while he was in grade school,” Dante said from the sideline. “His favorite, which he must have visited two or three times, was Fredericksburg.”

“Could visiting Fredericksburg make someone a Civil War expert?” Maggie Poole inquired eagerly; she had caught a glimpse of where they could be heading.

“Martin was a Fredericksburg expert, for sure,” Dante said with a laugh. His eyes were still tightly closed and he was beginning, once again, to enjoy the business of legend building; it seemed to him the closest he’d ever come to novel writing. “His stories about the battle there were so graphic, people who heard them sometimes jokingly wondered if he’d taken part in the Civil War.”

“Can you give us some examples?” the chairman asked.

“He would describe Bobby Lee, up on Marye’s Hill inland from Fredericksburg, pointing out Burnside’s command post in the Chatham Mansion across the Potomac to Stonewall Jackson and recalling that he’d courted his wife under that roof thirty years before. Martin would describe Old Pete Longstreet, his shoulders draped in a woman’s woolen shawl, watching the battle unfolding below him through a long glass fixed to a wooden tripod and telling everyone within earshot that the Federal attack on the sunken road had to be a feint, that the main attack would come somewhere else.”

The Legend Committee chairman peered at Dante over the rim of his wire eyeglasses. “Was Bobby Lee the General we know as Robert E. Lee?” he asked.