Inner demons, outer demons

In spy parlance, a “legend” is a fake identity, constructed as elaborately as a major character in a novel: background, accent, physical appearance, hobbies, quirks. And since we tend to become what we pretend to be, a spy doesn’t don or doff a legend like a suit of clothes; he more or less has to change selves.

In Robert Littell’s new espionage thriller, “Legends,” the hero, ex-CIA agent Martin Odum, now a private detective in Brooklyn, has had at least two other identities: Dante Pippen, an Irish Republican Army explosives expert, and Lincoln Dittmann, a sharpshooter and Civil War historian. Odum’s problem is that he can’t remember who he really is. He might be Odum, or Pippen or Dittmann, but he might be someone else entirely.

A disastrous mission to Moscow in the late 1980s left him with amnesia. This didn’t bother his boss, Crystal Quest, the agency’s deputy director of operations. She gave him a new legend and sent him back into action. But it bothers Odum in retirement. He’s a jumble of conflicting skills and tastes -- for example, one legend was a vegetarian, another a steak lover -- and he feels soiled, whoever he is, by some of the things he had to do to defend the Free World during the Cold War.

This is the third Littell novel I’ve read, following “Walking Back the Cat” and “The Debriefing,” and a common theme emerges: Though the Soviet Union is indeed an evil empire, the crimes of American spymasters seem less excusable. Unlike their Soviet counterparts, who remember their country’s agony under Nazi invasion, people like Quest are motivated by pure cynicism and love of the game; they are sociopaths who have lucked into jobs in which dissembling and paranoia are virtues. Decent people, such as Odum, are inevitably broken by the moral compromises spying demands. And “people who are broken,” he observes, “have several selves.”

In 1997, Odum the detective is hired by Stella Kastner, whose sister, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish settler on the West Bank in Israel, has been abandoned by her Russian husband, a relative of one of the “oligarchs” who plundered his country’s post-Communist economy. The sister can’t get a religious divorce unless he signs the papers, so Odum’s task is to find him.

From the beginning, Odum senses trouble. Kastner’s father, a former KGB agent, dies under suspicious circumstances, as does Odum’s girlfriend, a Chinese waitress. Quest somehow learns about Kastner’s request, warns Odum not to take the case and, when he does, conspires to have him killed.

But why? In search of the answers, Odum embarks on two journeys. The first is his pursuit of the runaway husband, Samat Ugor-Zhilov, from Israel to London to Prague to Belarus to an island in the shrinking Aral Sea where the Soviets conducted biological warfare experiments. Odum arrives finally at a dacha outside Moscow that seems ominously familiar.

The second journey is Odum’s ransacking of the past, including his undercover exploits as Pippen and Dittmann in the Middle East and South America (where he met Osama bin Laden) and his sessions with a CIA-vetted psychiatrist who was ordered to terminate the therapy before Odum could identify the trauma that wiped out his memory.

Littell plays fair: The clues are right out in the open, if only we could recognize them. And though “Legends” is an entertainment, it offers us unexpected literary pleasures, including a description of the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862 that rivals the one in Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.”

The novel’s conclusions are unsettling. All that keeps the U.S. military establishment from matching totalitarian powers or religious fanatics evil for evil, Littell implies, is a fading memory of rule by law and the scruples of a few people like Odum. That’s not much.

In two ways, perhaps, Littell overreaches. He tries to universalize Odum’s plight by saying that not only spies but most other people in the modern world live multiple lives. He makes this case with more wit than rigor. Also, he speculates that the economic collapse and gangster capitalism that afflicted Russia in the 1990s were orchestrated by the CIA to ensure that the Soviet Union’s successor would remain weak. This can’t be proved, of course, though it’s worth noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policies -- his wariness of the West, his centralization of power, his campaigns against the “oligarchs” -- make more sense if Littell’s speculations are true. *