“Such as?”
“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 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.”
“I have a hard time keeping track of your various identities.”
“Me, too. That’s why I’m here.”
“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 possibility 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.”
“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.”
To Martin’s surprise she’d come up with something that could pass for humor. “Changing the names to protect the guilty, too.”
There are other things, Martin thought now (continuing the conversation with Dr. Treffler in his mind), no matter how many times you do them, you don’t seem to do them better. Such as (he went on, anticipating her question) peeling hard-boiled eggs. Such as breaking into cheap hotel rooms to photograph married men having oral sex with prostitutes. Such as conveying to a Company-cleared shrink the impression that you didn’t have great expectations of working out an identity crisis. Tell me again what you hope to get out of these conversations? he could hear her asking. He supplied the answer he thought she wanted to hear: In theory, I’d like to know which one of my legends is me. He could hear her asking, Why in theory? He considered this for a moment. Then, shaking his head, he was surprised to hear his own voice responding out loud: “I’m not sure I have a need to know—in practice, I might be better able to get on with my dull life if I don’t know.”
Martin would have dragged out the fictitious dialogue with Dr. Treffler, if only to kill time, if he hadn’t heard the door buzzer. He padded in bare feet through the pool parlor, which he’d converted into an office, using one of the two tables as a desk and the other to lay out Lincoln Dittmann’s collection of Civil War firearms. At the top of the dimly lit flight of narrow wooden stairs leading to the street door, he crouched and peered down to see who could be ringing. Through the lettering and Mr. Pinkerton’s private eye logo he could make out a female standing with her back to the door, scrutinizing the traffic on Albany Avenue. Martin waited to see if she would ring again. When she did, he descended to the foyer and opened the two locks and the door.
The woman wore a long raincoat even though the sun was shining and carried a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Her dark hair was pulled back and twined into a braid that plunged down her spine to the hollow of her back—the spot where Martin had worn his hand gun (he’d recut the holster’s belt slot to raise the pistol into an old shrapnel wound) in the days when he’d been armed with something more lethal than cynicism. The hem of her raincoat flared above her ankles as she spun around to face him.
“So are you the detective?” she demanded.
Martin scrutinized her the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. She appeared to be in her mid or late thirties—guessing the ages of women had never been his strong suit. Spidery wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her eyes, which were fixed in a faint but permanent squint. On her thin lips was what from a distance might have passed for a ghost of a smile; up close it looked like an expression of stifled exasperation. She wore no makeup as far as he could see; there was the faint aroma of a rose-based perfume that seemed to come from under the collar on the back of her neck. She might have been taken for handsome if it hadn’t been for the chipped front tooth.
“In this incarnation,” he finally said, “I’m supposed to be a detective.”
“Does that mean you’ve had other incarnations?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “So are you going to invite me in or what?”
Martin stepped aside and gestured with his chin toward the steps. The woman hesitated as if she were calculating whether someone living over a Chinese restaurant could really be a professional detective. She must have decided she had nothing to lose because she took a deep breath and, turning sideways and sucking in her chest, edged past him and started up the stairs. When she reached the pool parlor she looked back to watch him emerging from the shadows of the staircase. She noticed he favored his left leg as he walked.
“What happened to your foot?” she asked.
“Pinched nerve. Numbness.”
“In your line of work, isn’t a limp a handicap?”
“The opposite is true. No one in his right mind would suspect someone with a limp of following him. It’s too obvious.”
“Still, you ought to have it looked at.”
“I’ve been seeing a Hasidic acupuncturist and a Haitian herbalist, but I don’t tell one about the other.”
“Have they helped you?”
“Uh-huh. One of them has—there’s less numbness now—but I’m not sure which.”
The ghost of a smile materialized on her lips. “You seem to have a knack for complicating simple things.”
Martin, with a cold politeness that masked how close he was to losing interest, said, “In my book that beats simplifying complicated things.”
Depositing her satchel on the floor, the woman slipped out of her raincoat and carefully folded it over the banister. She was wearing running sneakers, tailored trousers with pleats at the waist and a man’s shirt that buttoned from left to right. Martin saw that the three top buttons were open, revealing a triangle of pale skin on her chest. There was no sign of an undergarment. The observation made him suck in his cheeks; it occurred to him that the bee stings might be having some effect after all.
The woman wheeled away from Martin and wandered into the pool parlor, her eyes taking in the faded green felt on the two old tables, the moving company cartons sealed with masking tape piled in a corner next to the rowing machine, the overhead fan turning with such infinite slowness that it seemed to impart its lethargic rhythm to the space it was ventilating. This was obviously a realm where time slowed down. “You don’t look like someone who smokes cigars,” she ventured when she spotted the mahogany humidor with the built in thermometer on the pool table that served as a desk.