Legends

  “One of the workman on the road crew, the ironmonger in point of fact, was employed by our security services,” the interrogator said. “He had a camera hidden in the thermos in his lunch box. Do you recognize yourself in these photographs, gospodin Kafkor?”

  A single word worked its way up from Martin’s parched throat. “Nyet.”

  The interrogator switched off the light. Martin felt the world spinning giddily under his feet. His lids drifted closed over his eyes as his forehead sank onto one of the photos. The interrogator didn’t break the silence until the prisoner sat up again.

  Martin heard himself ask, “When did all this happen?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Martin sagged back into his seat. “For me,” he remarked tiredly, “yesterday is a long time ago, the day before yesterday is a previous incarnation.”

  “The photographs were taken in 1994,” the interrogator said.

  Martin breathed the words “Three years ago!” Kneading his forehead, he tried to work the pieces of this strange puzzle into place, but no matter which way he turned and twisted them, no coherent picture emerged. “What happened after this individual was buried alive?” he asked.

  “When the photographs were developed and circulated, we decided to mount an operation to free him—to free you—in the hope that you were still alive. When we reached the site of the execution, in the dead of night, we discovered the peasants, led by the village priest, had already scraped away the tarmac and pried up the planks and rescued the man buried in the crater. Before first light, our people helped the peasants replace the planks and tar over the spot.”

  “And what happened to … this person?”

  “The village’s tractor repairman drove you to Moscow in Prigorodnaia’s tow truck. His intention was to take you to a hospital. At a red light on the ring road, not far from the American Embassy, you leaped from the cab of the truck and disappeared in the darkness. Neither the municipal police nor our service was able to find any trace of you after that. As far as we were concerned, you disappeared from the surface of the earth—until today, until a custom’s officer at the airport signaled the arrival of a Canadian bearing a passport issued to Kafkor, Jozef. We assumed you would be returning to Prigorodnaia, which is the reason the interior ministry troops closed the road—we knew we could pick you up on the way out.”

  A secretary appeared behind the desk and, bending close, whispered in the interrogator’s ear. Clearly annoyed, the interrogator demanded, “How long ago?” Then: “How in the world did he find out?” Shaking his head in disgust, the interrogator turned back to Martin. “The CIA station chief in Moscow has learned that you are in our hands. He is sending a formal request through channels asking us to turn you over to his agency for interrogation when we’ve finished with you.”

  “Why would the CIA want to question Jozef Kafkor?”

  “They will want to discover if you were able to tell us what we want to know.”

  “And what is it that you want to know?”

  “Whose side were they on—Samat Ugor-Zhilov and the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov? And where are they now?”

  “Samat took refuge in a West Bank Jewish settlement in Israel.”

  The interrogator carefully unhooked his eyeglasses from one ear and then the other and began to clean the lenses with the tip of his silk tie. “Bring tea,” he instructed the secretary. “Also those brioche cakes stuffed with fig confiture.” He fitted the glasses back on and, collecting the five photographs, slipped them back into the folder. “Gospodin Kafkor, the Russian Federal Security Service is underfunded and understaffed and underappreciated, but we are not dimwits. That Samat took refuge in Israel we have known for a long time. We were negotiating with the Israeli Mossad to have access to him when word reached him that Chechen hit men had tracked him to Israel, causing him to flee the country. But where did he go when he disappeared from Israel?”

  The interrogator leafed through more reports. “He was sighted in the Golders Green section of London. He was seen again in the vicinity of the Vyshrad Train Station in Prague. He was said to have visited the town of Kantubek on the island of Vozrozhdeniye in the Aral Sea. There were reports, too, that he may have gone to the Lithuanian town of Zuzovka not far from the frontier with Belarus. There is even a rumor that he was the mysterious person who turned up in the helicopter that touched down for half an hour behind the cemetery in Prigorodnaia.”

  The secretary turned up at the door carrying a tray. The interrogator motioned for him to set it on the small round table between two high-backed chairs and leave. When he was alone with the prisoner, he waved him over to one of the chairs. Settling into the other chair, he filled two mugs with steaming tea. “You must try one of the cakes,” he advised, sliding the straw basket toward Martin. “They are so delicious it must surely count as a sin to eat them. So, gospodin Kafkor, let us sin together,” he added, biting into one of the cakes, cupping a hand under it to catch the crumbs.

  “My name is Cheklachvili,” the interrogator said, speaking as he took another bite out of his cake. “Arkhip Cheklachvili.”

  “That’s a Georgian name,” Martin noted.

  “My roots are Georgian, though I have long since offered my allegiance to Mother Russia. It was me,” he added with a distinct twinkle in his eyes, “the ironmonger on the slope who was employed by our security services. It was me who took the photographs of you with a camera hidden in my lunch box.”

  “You’ve come up in the world,” Martin commented.

  “Photographing your execution was my first great triumph. It caught the attention of my superiors and started me up the career ladder. After you jumped from the tow truck and disappeared in Moscow, we heard rumors that you had found your way to the American Embassy on the ring road. The CIA station chief himself was said to have taken you in charge. There was a flurry of coded radio traffic for forty-eight hours, after which you were spirited out of Moscow in an embassy car heading for Finland. There were five men in the car—all of them had diplomatic passports and were able to pass the frontier without scrutiny. What happened to you after that we simply do not know. To tell you the truth, I suspect you don’t know either.”

  Martin stared at his interrogator. “What makes you suppose that?”

  The interrogator collected his thoughts. “My father was arrested by the KGB in 1953. He was accused of being an American agent and sentenced by a summary tribunal to be shot. The guards took him from his cell in the vast Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB one night in March and brought him to the elevator that carried prisoners down to the vaulted basements for execution. When they discovered that the elevator was not working, they returned him to his cell. Technicians worked through the night to repair the elevator. In the morning the guards came for my father again. They were waiting for the elevator to climb to their floor when word reached them that Stalin was dead. All executions were cancelled. Several months later the new leadership killed Beria and issued a general amnesty, and my father was set free.”

  “What does his story have to do with me?”

  “I remember my father returning to our communal apartment—I was six years old at the time. It had been raining and he was drenched to the skin. My mother asked him where he had been. He shook his head in confusion. There was a vacant look in his eyes, as if he had glimpsed some horrible thing, some monster or some ghost. He didn’t remember his arrest, he didn’t remember the summary tribunal, he didn’t remember the guards leading him to the elevator for execution. It was all erased from his consciousness. When I went to work for the security apparatus, I looked up his dossier and found out what had happened to him. By then my father had been put out to pasture. One day, years later, I worked up the nerve to tell him what I had discovered. He listened the way one does to the story of someone else’s life, and smiled politely as if the life I had dredged up had nothing to do with him, and went on with the life he remembered. Which was the life he lived until the day he died.”


  Drinking off the last of his tea, the interrogator produced a small key from the pocket of his vest and offered it to Martin. “If you go through that door, you will find a narrow staircase spiraling down six floors to the street level. The key opens the door at the bottom of the staircase leading to a side street. When you are outside, lock the door behind you and throw the key down a sewer.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I believe you when you say you don’t remember being brought across the river and buried alive. I believe you when you say you don’t know Samat Ugor-Zhilov or his uncle, the Oligarkh. I have concluded that you are unable to help us with our inquiries. If you are intelligent, you will quit Russia as rapidly as you can. Whatever you do, don’t go to the American Embassy—the CIA station chief has been making discreet inquiries for the past several weeks about someone named Martin Odum. From his description, we suspect that Martin Odum and Jozef Kafkor are the same person.”

  Martin started to mutter his thanks but the interrogator cut him off. “The skeletal man in the third photograph, the one offering the condemned man a last cigarette, is Samat Ugor-Zhilov. The man with silver hair watching the execution from the partly open window of the automobile is the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov. Keep in mind that they attempted to execute you once. They would surely try again if they discover your whereabouts. Ah, I must not forget to return to you your belongings.” He retrieved the Canadian passport, the wad of bills, the picture postcard showing a family strolling down a country road somewhere in north America and the shoelaces, and handed everything to the prisoner.

  The interrogator watched as the prisoner threaded the laces through his shoes. When Martin looked up, the interrogator shrugged his heavy shoulders, a gesture that conveyed his presumption there was nothing more to say.

  Martin nodded in agreement. “How can I repay you?” he asked.

  “You cannot.” The lines around the interrogator’s eyes stretched into a controlled smile. “By the way, Arkhip Cheklachvili is a legend. I assume that Jozef Kafkor and Martin Odum are also legends. The cold war is over, still we live our legends. You may well be its last victim, lost in a labyrinth of legends. Perhaps with the aid of the postcard, you will be able to find a way out.”

  1992: HOW LINCOLN DITTMANN CAME TO GO TO LANGUAGE SCHOOL

  “GENTLEMEN AND LADIES,” DECLARED THE FORMER STATION CHIEF who chaired the Legend Committee, rapping his knuckles on the oval table to encourage his charges to simmer down, “I invite your attention to a remarkable detail that we seem to have overlooked in Martin Odum’s biography.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked the Yale-educated aversion therapist. “His mother was—”

  “She was Polish, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Maggie Poole, speaking, as always, with more than a trace of the British accent that had rubbed off on her at Oxford. She added brightly, “His mother immigrated to les Etats Unis after the Second World War.”

  “We are on to something,” said the only other woman on the committee, a lexicographer on permanent loan from the University of Chicago. “I simply can’t believe we missed this.”

  “The detail has been staring us in the face every time we worked up a cover story for him,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a grizzly CIA fossil who had begun his long and illustrious career devising false identities for OSS agents during World War Two. He looked at the chairman and asked, “What started you thinking along these lines?”

  “When Lincoln Dittmann returned home from Triple Border,” the chairman said, “the subsequent action report mentioned that he’d overheard an old lottery vender talking Polish to a hooker in a bar and discovered he could catch the drift of what they were saying.”

  “That’s because his mother used to read him bedtime stories in Polish when they were living in that Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown,” the aversion therapist explained impatiently.

  “Mon Dieu, six months of intensive tutoring and he’ll talk Polish like a native,” said Maggie Poole.

  “Which is not how you talk American English,” quipped the aversion therapist.

  “You can’t resist, can you, Troy?”

  “Oh, dear, resist what?” he asked, looking around innocently.

  The chairman rapped his knuckles on the table again. “Given what the Deputy Director of Operations has in mind for Lincoln,” he said, “he really ought to speak Russian, too.”

  “Martin Odum studied Russian at college,” the lexicographer noted. “Not surprisingly, he wound up speaking it with a Polish accent.”

  “While the tutors are bringing his Polish up to snuff,” Maggie Poole suggested, “they could also work on his Russian.”

  “Okay, let’s summarize,” said the chairman. “What we have is a Polish national who, like most Poles, speaks fluent Russian. What we need now is a name.”

  “Let’s be simple for once.”

  “Easier said than done. Le simple nest pas le facile.”

  “What about using Franz-Jozef as a first name?”

  “Are we being inspired by the Emperor of Austria or Haydn?”

  “Either, or.”

  “What about just plain Jozef,” offered Maggie Poole.

  “Half of Poland is named Jozef.”

  “That’s precisely the point, it seems to me,” she retorted.

  “That’s not what you argued when we settled on the name Dante Pippen. You said nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pippen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it was so unusual.”

  Maggie Poole would not be put off. “Consistency,” she said huffily, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative. That’s Oscar Wilde, in case you’re wondering.”

  “I happen to be rereading Kafka’s Amerika.”

  “For God’s sake, you’re not going to suggest Kafka as a family name.”

  “I was going to suggest a Polish-sounding variation. Kafkor.”

  “Kafkor, Jozef. Not half bad. It’s short and sweet, an easy handle to slip into, I should think. What do you think, Lincoln?”

  Lincoln Dittmann, gazing out the window of the fourth floor conference room at the hundreds of cars in the Langley parking lot, turned back toward the members of the Legend Committee. “A variation on the name of Kafka—Kafkor—seems appropriate enough.”

  “What on earth do you mean by appropriate?”

  “Kafka wrote stories about anguished individuals struggling to survive a nightmarish world, which was more or less how the principal of this new legend would see himself.”

  “You’ve obviously read Kafka,” Maggie Poole said.

  “He could have read into Kafka at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow,” someone noted.

  “He could have worked summers as a guide at Auschwitz.”

  “Through our contacts in Warsaw, we could land him a job in the Polish tourist bureau in Moscow. From there he ought to be able to make contact with the DDO target without attracting too much attention to himself.”

  “Question of knowing where this Samat character hangs out when he’s in Moscow.”

  “That’s Crystal Quest’s bailiwick,” Lincoln remarked.

  1997: MARTIN ODUM GETS TO INSPECT THE SIBERIAN NIGHT MOTH

  THE PHONE ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE HAD RUNG SO MANY times, Martin had given up counting. He decided to let it ring all evening, all night, all the next day if necessary. She had to return home sometime. A woman carrying a sleeping baby on her hip rapped a coin against the glass door of the booth and angrily held up her wrist so that Martin could see the watch on it. Muttering “Find another booth—I bought this one,” he turned his back on her. Shaking her head at how insufferable certain inhabitants of the borough had become, the woman stalked off. In Martin’s ear the phone continued to ring with such regularity that he ceased to be conscious of the sound. His thoughts wandered—he played back what he could remember of the previous phone calls. To his surprise, he was able to recreate her voice in his brain as if he wer
e a skillful ventriloquist. He could hear her saying, When the answers are elusive you have to learn to live with the questions.

  It dawned on him that the phone was no longer ringing on the other end of the line. Another human being was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.

  “Stella?”

  “Martin, is that you?” a voice remarkably like Stella’s demanded.

  Martin was surprised when he realized how eager he was to hear that voice; to talk to the one person on earth who was not put off because he wasn’t sure who he was, who seemed ready to live with whatever version of himself he offered up. Suddenly he felt the dead bird stirring in him: He ached to see the night moth tattooed under her breast.

  “It’s me, Stella. It’s Martin.”

  “Jesus, Martin. Wow. I can’t believe it.”

  “I’ve been ringing for hours. Where were you?”

  “I met some Russians in Throckmorton’s Minimarket on Kingston Avenue. They were new immigrants, practically off the boat. I was entertaining them with jokes I used to tell in Moscow when I worked for subsection Marx. You want to hear a great one I just remembered?”

  “Uh-huh.” Anything to keep her talking.

  She giggled at the punch line before she told the joke. “Okay,” she said, collecting herself. “Three men find themselves in a cell in the Lubyanka prison. After awhile the first prisoner asks the second, ‘What are you here for?’ And the second prisoner says, ‘I was against Popov. What about you?’ And the first prisoner says, ‘I was for Popov.’ The two turn to the third prisoner and ask, “Why were you arrested?’ And he answers, ‘I’m Popov.’”