A Master of Tradecraft

...signature character tics...

...Under Jewish law she is unable to remarry until she receives a divorce, called a get, that can only be granted by the husband...

...In 1991, after managing to penetrate an AI Qaeda camp in South America and meeting Osama bin Laden, Dittmann attempts to impress on his CIA boss the importance of taking the terrorist leader's charisma seriously...

...Building a legend, Littell notes, even by committee, is the closest most people may ever come to "novel writing...

...What do we put on the advisory we send out to our stations...

...Wanted, dead or alive, one charismatic Saudi.'" Meanwhile, Martin Odum's travails convey a nuanced sense of the tragedy of contemporary Russiaboth pure outrage at the wholesale trashing of the economy by predators and thugs, and a complex understanding of Communist ideology's power to move noble if misguided spirits...

...All this may be great stuff, yet it would come off as only slightly better than standard thriller fare were it not for the interweaving-through a series of essentially flashback chapters-of Martin's alter egos...

...Celebrated as a master of the espionage tale, most recently for The Company, his bestseller about the CIA, he proves equally adept as a writer of the detective mystery, straddling both genres...

...One is in the highly cinematic opening chapter, which takes place on a road being paved outside the Oligarkh's dacha in Prigorodnaia...

...From Kiryat Arba it moves to London, then Prague-both bases where Samat operates illegal arms distribution centers behind humanitarian fronts-then to a disastrously polluted island in the shrinking Aral Sea, where Samat has a bioweapons testing business run by a somewhat comical creep, a sort of Kurtz clone out of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness...

...The idea of tradecraft may be applied to the writer as well-and, in that sense, Littell is clearly in charge...

...A certain cool professionalism and control, known in CIA parlance as "tradecraft," is a value Littell invokes throughout Legends...

...It is, as Odum says, "a good question...

...Whatever your initial assumptions, they are probably wrong...

...Legends possesses many of the gripping features of the traditional fast-paced thriller, including comfortably recognizable, stilted dialogue...

...Insisting he was present at that battle in 1862 where Union soldiers were slaughtered by the rebels, he describes how he wandered over to the Confederate side before the fighting began, was arrested as a spy, and condemned to death...

...He is given a last cigarette by Samat, then made to lie down in the crater in the fetal position, and the pavement is poured over him...

...He is wearing a crown of thorns, with visible marks of torture on his body and a sign safety-pinned between his shoulder blades bearing the words, "The spy Kafkor...

...Virtually everybody we encounter has at least one alternative identity, whether self-created for survival's sake or, as with the novel's protagonist, generated by a team for operational purposes-a fabricated personality known in CIA jargon as a "legend...

...Through Lincoln Dittmann, Littell devastatingly illuminates the bitter consequences of crude official smugness and failure of the imagination...

...The legends do more than enlarge the canvas to incorporate the spy genre...

...When you come right down to it, all men and some women live with an assortment of legends that blur at the edges where they overlap," Israeli Mossad agent Benny Sapir comments to our main characters), ex-CIA agent and detective Martin Odum, Irish explosives expert Dante Pippen, and arms dealer Lincoln Dittmann...

...Martin is hired by Russian emigre Stella Kastner to track down her sister's missing husband...

...Samat, for his own reasons, had arranged to have them returned from Argentina...

...In this instance, the novelist arrives with one of his own...

...That's a load of crap, Lincoln," is the official response...

...The three of them-and quite possibly one other who casts a disturbing and elusive shadow-inhabit the same body...

...Next, Martin heads for a small Lithuanian town on the border of Belarus, where Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox residents are massacring each other over the bones of an obscure saint that had been stolen by the Nazis...

...The genres and legends merge seamlessly by the end: Nearly every dot is connected, and most questions lingering in the back of the reader's mind are resolved...

...His last words are, "I see the elephant...

...The detective story opens in 1997...

...He taught this trick in 1989 to fedayeen in the Bekaa Valley as part of his efforts to infiltrate their camp...

...A devoutly Orthodox Jew living in the Israeli West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba, overlooking the ancient holy city of Hebron, the sister has been left an agunah by his disappearance-literally, a chained wife...

...Just as he was about to be buried alive by order of the "religious fanatic" Stonewall Jackson, the first shots of the battle rang out and he was freed by "Bobby" Lee, because "There will be enough killing on these fields today to last a man a lifetime...

...Her awol husband is the Armenian-Russian Saraat Ugor-Zhilov, chief brain behind the multitentacled financial empire of his uncle Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov, a sinister figure known as the Oligarkh...

...That line is pursued in a subplot during his sessions with a CIA-approved psychiatrist...

...To complicate matters, the Oligarkh himself, as well as the CIA for its own unsavory reasons, have a stake in making sure Martin never catches up with Samat The hunt sends Martin on a whirlwind chase, always one stop behind the missing husband...

...The result is that the classic enigmaWho am I?-becomes a running joke...

...Espionage's unforeseen tragic effects are brought home very personally to Dante Pippen, for example, when he learns his friend Benny Sapir's son, an Israeli soldier, was killed by explosives hidden inside the body cavity of a dog carcass on the road...

...On one level, Odum's affliction can be reduced to a case of multiple personality disorder triggered by a repressed childhood trauma...

...Holding up a board with the words, "The spy Dittmann," he was given the traditional last cigarette...

...The novel's mystery element centers on the search for this repressed memory...

...Without spoiling the very real elements of surprise and suspense that animate this book, one can point to two scenes, each a kind of tour-de-force, that encompass many of its disparate streams...

...So is another uncle, Akim Ugor-Zhilov, now enjoying luxurious asylum in Caesaria, Israel, who claims Samat siphoned off millions from his assets...

...The penultimate stop, before a final return to America for the showdown, is Prigorodnaia, on a spur of the MoscowPetersburg Highway, where the Oligarkh has a dacha that had once belonged to Lavrenti P. Beria, Stalin's notorious executioner...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara," "Master of the Return," "The Jewish War" Almost immediately you catch on that each new character in Robert Littell's latest thriller should be greeted with suspicion...

...More interesting, though, because it does not simply boil down toadiagnosis of aparticular pathology, is the layering of personality through the accumulation of legends around a "spinal column' of truth and a trauma stemming from an affront to deep-seated ethical conviction...

...he also gets his ribs broken and dodges countless attempts onhis life...

...Martin, it turns out, is not the only one after Samat...

...In the course of this pursuit, he is repeatedly stripped naked and body-searched, brutally interrogated, disoriented by sleep deprivation, and locked in an animal cage to be used as a subject for chemical weapons experimentation...

...In the presence of the construction crew, villagers and the Oligarkh himself, a naked prisoner is brought up from the nearby river to a crater in the road...

...and a hopelessly romantic hero straight off the big screen...

...But the imposition of the book's theme-the idea of the ambiguity of personality (which is quite different, as presented here, from the familiar CIA cover or false identity)-endows it with greater depth, a human complexity that compels the reader to take it more seriously...

...When Martin Odum quits the CIA and comes in from the cold to hang out his shingle as a detective in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, it is clearly in reaction to some horrifying event-a violation of his essential being so morally and physically repugnant that he has banished it from memory...

...Three hundred pages later, Lincoln Dittmann, who is an expert on Civil War history, particularly the Battle of Fredericksburg, recounts to the CIA psychiatrist how he, too, saw the elephant...

...they have the effect of enriching the protagonist's character, lending him moral weight, a political and historical conscience, and a feeling for human suffering...

...Chechens who believe he is responsible for the assassination of their leader, the Ottoman, are interested in getting their hands on him as well...